


Psyby's Writing Desk

by PsychicBeagle



Category: Genei Ibun Roku #FE | Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE, Ikenfell (Video Game), Mystery Skulls Animated, Original Work, Scooby Doo - All Media Types
Genre: By That I Mean Puns, Creatively Crude, Essays, Psyby Jokes, Spoilers, TV Tropes references, Trope Deconstruction, Writing Advice, lots of puns
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:47:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 27,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27593674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PsychicBeagle/pseuds/PsychicBeagle
Summary: An amateur writer has things to say about trends in writing. Informative things? Probably. Interesting things? Hopefully. Funny things? I'll try.Each chapter will be on a different talking point, centering around the work in the chapter's title. You can expect spoilers for all works discussed. I like being thorough.Let's see what I feel like rambling about today, eh?
Comments: 78
Kudos: 35





	1. Generalizations - Tokyo Mirage Sessions

Unless you’re one of my normal readers who came here because I talked about this little project elsewhere, you’re probably wondering what a non-story is doing on your favorite story site. For those newcomers, hello! I’m Psyby, aspiring author and dissector of storytelling. I like pulling stories apart, finding useful lessons in the remains, and wearing whatever is left afterwards as a funny hat.

But, much like funny hats, there’s only so much use a lesson can have with one person alone. I’m here to share some of the learnings that I’ve scooped up over the last few years of hobby writing in hopes that someone out there finds them as useful as me. Maybe you’ll walk away with some ideas to apply to your fanfics and make them more enjoyable to write. Maybe you’ll find the key to bringing that original story you’ve been working on together at last. Or maybe you just think a writer talking about the nitty-gritty in a craft where you usually only get to see the end product is interesting. I’m more than okay with any of the above.

To keep to the Archive’s theme of transformative works, I’ll be giving these lessons through the lenses of stories I’ve found to be highly demonstrative of the topic at hand. Games, shows, books, fanfics, any sort of story is fair game.

I’ll be starting with a big one, a core idea that can have sweeping effects on how works are viewed and made. One of the worst things you can do to any story is to try boiling its content down to overly simplified terms. In most cases, more work goes into any one aspect worth talking about in a story than can be properly summarized into a jaunty phrase. Simply put, generalizations are not your friend.

I recently picked up a game I think was brutally assassinated by generalizations in wider discussions around it. In truth, my need to discuss this very game was the first domino that lead me to creating this series of mad hatter ramblings masquerading as informative essays. It was a fine game smothered in the crib by fandom expectations, never given the chance to shine on the stage of its dreams. That poor, unfortunate title is “Tokyo Mirage Sessions.”

One day some five years ago, Nintendo and Atlus got together and said, “Hey, Fire Emblem and Shin Megami Tensei are a couple of series that have exploded in popularity in recent years, bringing us both boatloads of cash after decades of middling sales and cult appeal. We should make a crossover!” And so was TMS conceived.

This was the concept that fans of both franchises heard before all else, and excitement was brewing. While no one knew which gameplay style it would pull from, there was some expectation that the story they were about to receive would be something special.

Fire Emblem revels in themes of war. What drives people to shed blood on the intercontinental scale? Are their ends worth the means? How do good, peaceable men hold up as the bodies pile around them? What cost is a handful of lives for what is perceived to be the greater good? They are, at their core, political thrillers that set you at the helm of piloting the war machine to an outcome in which, hopefully, human suffering is kept as minimal as possible when rivers run red.

Shin Megami Tensei’s lofty themes tend to center around the human condition as a whole and its place in the wider universe. What is good? What is evil? Would you rather live in a world of order where all people exist merely as drones to a higher power to prevent conflict, or a lawless wasteland where the strong claim all they want from the weak with no oversight besides pure strength? Does any of this even matter since life’s end is swift and inevitable? You are made to fight the physical manifestations of concepts that seem so titanic as to be unquestionable, ultimately asking the worth of humanity as a whole against the backdrop of life’s inherent chaos.

With these track records in mind, people watched with bated breath to see how these grand ideas would come together. Even if they didn’t care about themes, the scale of the thing would be awe-inspiring at the surface level. How could it be anything less?

Those hopes hit a bit of a bump when the game was revealed in more detail. “Tokyo Mirage Sessions” would be centered on the Japanese idol industry, with a visual style that emphasized bright colors and poppy fun. Rather than the dark or earthy styles of mainline SMT or Fire Emblem, the crossover instead shined neon.

It was a disconcerting revelation, but many in-the-know kept high expectations. After all, one of the most popular characters in all of SMT is Rise Kujikawa, the ex-idol of “Persona 4” whose character arc originates in critique for the industry’s soul-sucking practices. Would the franchises be teaming up to create a whole game lambasting the toxic elements of idolhood, while highlighting those aspects of it that many artists and fans see value in? An unorthodox idea, most certainly, but “strange” might as well be Atlus’s middle name. It could still be great!

The high expectations, however, were thoroughly dashed when the game actually hit store shelves. The gameplay was amazing, critics said, but the story was so basic and devoid of higher themes as to be a bore. Instead of critiquing the machine, the game largely stuck to the glamour that draws in young hopefuls, only to see them splattered by its cogs. They saw in it the writing of a bottom-to-mid shelf RPG, where many fans expected Atlus’s high-end reputation to shine. As a user of TV Tropes might say, play the game, skip the story.

This critical reaction, in turn, washed the game’s potential sales down the drain. After all, RPGs are a genre that were created specifically to tell grand stories. An RPG with a dull plot is as useless as a beat ‘em up without crunchy attacks, or a shooter whose bullets feel like Nerf darts. People didn’t like what they heard, so a large swathe of its audience walked away, leaving TMS with middling sales.

I was one of the few who still played the game anyway, but mostly because I was able to rent it. What’s there to lose if it’s not that great, I told myself. Just send it back and rent a different RPG for the itch. I got my copy, stuck it in that poor unfortunate Wii U…

...And I loved every damn second of it.

I loved it so much that I was all ears when I heard they were making an updated rerelease for the Switch. I played it all over again on the new hardware, and I loved it just as much the second time around.

To think, I would have skipped the game entirely if I hadn’t been a Gamefly member. What a travesty that would have been! I nearly missed out on a great time because people discussing it said “play the game, skip the story.” It makes me wonder, is there any objective truth to what the critics said? Am I just weird for liking it so much when everyone else gave it a solid “meh?”

I can say, as someone who has played the whole game twice, that the critics were absolutely… right. Kind of.

The gameplay is, indeed, amazing, and I could go on for days about the visual and aural splendor through which the game is expressed, but that’s not the part of the equation we need to examine here. The important part is the story. The story, they said, was boring. It lacked poignant themes like the root franchises. It was worth skipping. And they have a point. The main plot of “Tokyo Mirage Sessions” is a serviceable vehicle for the crossover and little more.

You are Itsuki Aoi, a high schooler from Tokyo who happens on your friend, Tsubasa Oribe, auditioning at an idol competition. Suddenly, the host reveals himself to be a gray-skinned monster, and dark energy washes over the stage. All of the contestants are swept away through a portal into an artsy, absurdist landscape with floating platforms and roaming monsters that want nothing more than to suck the life force/creative spirit, called Performa, from humans.

Itsuki jumps headlong into the gate to save his friend, where both he and her are accosted by two of the monsters, called Mirages. Yes, as in the second word of the game’s patchwork title. One of them force-chokes Tsubasa, and the other charges Itsuki with a blade. But then, Itsuki’s Performa comes to life, and he uses it, seemingly by instinct, as a weapon against the Mirages.

It is revealed then, as Itsuki’s Performa peels away the Mirages’ red robes, that both monsters were actually characters from the Fire Emblem series. Itsuki’s Mirage turns out to have been Chrom, the main Lord from FE: Awakening, and Tsubasa’s was Caeda, one of the first usable units in the first Fire Emblem. They were being controlled by a shadowy force that stole their memories and turned them into vessels to harvest Performa for an unknown, but surely dastardly objective.

The newly freed Chrom and Caeda bind themselves to Itsuki and Tsubasa, turning into weapons, called Carnages, that they can use in battle. They also grant really swanky outfits, because why fight if you can’t be downright styling while doing so? The two newly awoken Mirage Masters are then swept into a conspiracy in which the fate of the world rests on their ability to sing.

Skipping ahead about two-thirds of the game, it comes to light that the main villain is Gharnef, the very first big bad from the original Fire Emblem. He wants to revive the Shadow Dragon, just like in his original appearance, to obliterate the world. Why? Because it’s his “duty.” No, that’s explicitly what he says when asked. There’s some backstory about him being a scorned magic student who first wanted to revive the Dragon out of revenge, but now he just does it because it’s what he does. And the Shadow Dragon is just a monster that wants to destroy things because that’s what monsters do.

On its own, that wouldn’t be a deal breaker. They were unambiguous villains in the first game, too, and they worked well in that role because of the humans who allowed them to rise. In most FE games, there tends to be a pure evil force operating in the background, pulling strings to make the plot move. The humans who aid them do so because they’re being controlled through their vices. The big evil dragon promises them power, or riches, or revenge, and these motivations create interesting, complex villains whose actions say something about humanity. Very human motivations lead the world to doom, and only virtuous motivations on the part of the main heroes can stop them.

TMS kind of follows this pattern, but not to the same effect. Remember how the plot summary above began with a gray monster dude kidnapping people? That guy turns out to have been possessed by an enemy Mirage, like how Chrom and Caeda were going to nab Itsuki and Tsubasa. Powerful Mirages need humans to act as proxies in the real world, and they forcibly form these partnerships by hypnotizing the host with their greatest desires. In order to break the connection, you need to make the Mirage reveal itself, usually by straining or shattering the illusion of their deal with the host, and then beat the crap out of it until it’s unable to maintain the connection, like poking a tick with a hot needle until it can’t hold on anymore.

You can probably tell where that premise leads. The first half of the game sees your group interact with old hotshots from various idol-related industries. You usually meet them because Tsubasa ends up working with them as part of her idol training. But, since she’s just starting out, she struggles to live up to their expectations. The old blood turns out to have been possessed by a Mirage, Tsubasa is forced to learn a lesson about their field of expertise in order to make them fight back against the Mirage, you kick said Mirage’s ass, and then Tsubasa gets a nice cutscene of her succeeding at whatever thing she was learning to do that chapter.

This section of the game is where the story is at its most interesting because each dungeon acts as a very definitive step in Tsubasa’s career as an idol. She’s effectively the main character for as long as this pattern repeats, and it works as a vehicle to tour various aspects of the job.

Unfortunately, this back-and-forth between her and the possessed experts doesn’t really say much. Their issues all boil down to, “Kids these days don’t understand the _real soul_ of X.” Tsubasa improving before their eyes tells them, “Oh shit, here’s a kid that might understand X. She’s not amazing yet, but she’s obviously learning. Hey, ghost dude, fuck off! I’ve got work to do.” Like I said, it works as a showing of Tsubasa’s progress towards her goal of being a great idol, but in terms of greater themes like what Fire Emblem might explore, there’s not much.

Which is a shame, because it means that the few times that the possessed person does have a greater issue don’t get explored as deeply as they deserve to be. The very first chapter of the game after the tutorial has arguably the greatest showing of the main story’s missed potential.

So, background. When you start a new game, the first thing you see is an anime-style cutscene showing an event called the Mass Disappearance. It was a massive theatrical play where the entire cast and crowd suddenly vanished. As you might have guessed, Mirages did it, and this big vanishing trick effectively kicks off many of the main casts’ character arcs. The important thing to know for now is that the only seen survivor of the event was a very young Tsubasa. She was in the audience watching her sister, Ayaha, perform. Tsubasa decides to work as a Mirage Master later on because she realizes that the Mirages are connected to her sister’s disappearance, and she’s hellbent on finding out what happened, not to mention becoming an idol herself to live up to Ayaha’s legacy. Tsubasa’s sister means everything to her.

Surprise, surprise, the very next possessed person you meet is Ayaha! Reunion! Except, she’s acting strange. The Mirage is preventing her from recognizing Tsubasa. On top of that, Ayaha is completely devoid of expression. She’s basically her Mirage’s puppet. Every other possessed target has their obsessions cranked up to the max, creating a lovely helping of ham that screams about their motivations at every turn. But Ayaha is just… blank.

When you start pressuring the Mirage’s plans, as heroes are known to do, Ayaha has to be prodded into obeying by her Mirage reminding her of why she fell under control in the first place. Being an idol was a dream turned nightmare for the poor girl. The ceaseless work and demands of her superiors crushed her spirit. She only went through the motions, deadened on the inside. By falling under a Mirage’s control, she gave up her free will. Ayaha can’t be crushed under the Mirage’s wing. Just let it puppet her body, and she’s free. That’s the obsession being exploited: a dream of release.

Now _that_ sounds familiar, right? It’s the same thing that Rise Kujikawa was written to comment on. The idol industry drains its talent dry, then throws it away. Creatives are broken at the titan’s feet. The Mirages are exploiting that fault, using it as a way to invade the minds of people with enough Performa to sustain a possession. Human vice is leading the world to destruction.

Tsubasa’s first big challenge is breaking through to her own sister. By stepping up and filling Ayaha’s shoes, by becoming an idol who inspires joy and hope in the people who listen to her song, she’s able to reach out and remind Ayaha of why she put up with the pressure. She inspires her sister the same way her sister inspired her so many years ago. It’s a beautiful conclusion to the journey’s first official step.

...And none of it is explored beyond this chapter. No, seriously. Ayaha becomes little more than a tertiary character working as an intern at your team’s company, Fortuna. Her only function in the plot is occasionally chiming in to support Tsubasa. Well, that and handing out a handful of side quests, none of which explore the toxic factors that drove her into the arms of literal monsters. This is where any and all critique of a very troublesome industry ends.

The lighter romp the game ends up being is perfectly fine, I will say again, but starting it off with a single chapter of what people expected the whole game to be was a terrible decision. It teased us with some classic Rise Kujikawa, only to yank her away at the last minute and replace her with a Saturday morning cartoon about the power of friendship.

This, I feel, is one of the major contributing factors in the game’s wider reception. It’s like how “Watchdogs” saw its initial reception tank because the reveal trailers used misleading footage. They opened with something that looked phenomenal, but when the final product ended up being simply okay, the gap between expectations and reality pushed opinions on the game into the dirt. That’s why I keep mentioning Rise. It’s what people were expecting. When they didn’t get it, they walked away, ignoring what TMS actually brought to the table.

As I said above, I largely agree with that thread of critique. “Tokyo Mirage Session’s” main plot is just a serviceable platform for a crossover title.

But then, there’s a qualifier in that statement. The “main plot” is serviceable. The “main plot” can be skipped. When someone says the “story” can be skipped, however, I start taking issue. There’s something in the story, in the writing, that is absolutely worth your time. The main plot is a serviceable platform. What’s built on top of it to make the story as a whole stand out?

The excellent cast of goofballs that fills out your party roster, that’s what.

The character writing in this game is full of fun, memorable people whose personal stories are worth the price of admission. I love every single playable character, and the single member of the secondary cast of Fortuna who I don’t like still has great character beats that are worth exploring. Most of them initially fall into familiar tropes that you probably recognize from a hundred other shows or games, especially Japanese shows and games, but they are then fleshed out in ways that play off of the initial tropes.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. The main character, a plainly handsome dude with shaggy dark hair, has a childhood best friend. This little lady who grew up with the main character has a massive crush on him, but he’s too dense to notice even though she’s thirsty enough to drain the Amazon River. This allows the main character to unwittingly form a whole harem of new girls, which he is also oblivious of, much to the first girl’s annoyance. Even so, she’s unwavering in how nice she is to everyone, even the ones who threaten to take her crush from her while she remains unable to confess.

The childhood best friend in question is Tsubasa. She loves Itsuki, everyone sees it except Itsuki, and her romantic nervousness fuels many jokes. So far, so cliched. But, like I said, she breaks the initial mold in stellar fashion. No, she never does get her act together to confess, but her developing traits throw off the shackles of the childhood best friend in other ways. Specifically, she escapes the label by being more interesting than lukewarm dishwater.

The archetype’s function in most cases is to give the audience a “vanilla” option in a story with many prospective lovers. In mainstream Japanese culture, the bombastic heights that most fictional harem girls ascend to is seen as excessive. A lot of guys there don’t want girls who will chew them out for being friendly, or who might drag them into chaotic shenanigans at the drop of a hat. They want a normal, sweet girl who loves them and will always be there to support them. That’s it. Of course, this taste for girls who are so painfully modest as to be unable to confess can tread into sexist territory very easily, essentially saying that the perfect girl has no desire but to support the man in her life. Writing a girl whose only outstanding character trait is being in love with a guy is highly concerning, yeah?

TMS agrees. Which is why their childhood best friend might be the most madcap member of your entire troupe. For one quick example, an optional side story has her struggling with acting faux-seductive for a drink commercial. She needs to act like a little devil to tantalize the target audience into wanting that drink. How does she learn the ways of the devil? By finding a stray cat infamous for being capricious. Its name is literally “Little Devil.” She heard of this infamously touchy cat, and she thought to herself, “Now _there’s_ a master tease!” And it _works_! She becomes the new mascot for that damn drink for the rest of the game, all from staring at a fancy, fierce feline for several hours in the middle of Shibuya. “Vanilla” can shove it. Tsubasa might as well be a Ben & Jerry’s original flavor.

They even manage to evolve the joke of her unspeakable love. A good recurring gag doesn’t simply repeat. It finds new angles that build on the initial structure. Tsubasa loves Itsuki but can’t say it. You also learn that she’s a massive fangirl for another idol, Kiria, who you happen to recruit early in the game. Kiria is cool, collected, but supportive of her new coworkers. You can bet every time she pays Tsubasa praise, the younger idol melts into total fannish squealing. It would be borderline gay panic if she didn’t obviously love Itsuki.

When she happens to overhear Kiria talking to Itsuki about a joint project, though, all of Tsubasa’s buttons get hit at once. That’s not fair! That’s totally not fair! Why not pick me? I deserve the chance, too! Why not… Wait. Which of you am I jealous of again?

She is so smitten by both of her close friends, she’s not sure which one to be jealous of when they spend time together. I take back a prior statement. This girl is the embodiment of bisexual panic, and I am here for it. She needs to be sandwiched between Itsuki and Kiria in a group hug, stat!

All of the funny stuff aside, there is one big running thread to her character that completely inverts a problematic element of the original trope. The childhood friend is meant to be an unconditional supporter for the audience insert character. She’s there to serve the audience. Here, though, Tsubasa has her own ambitions to be chasing. She wants to be an idol like her sister was. She wants to be a ray of hope like what she needed when she was young. She desperately desires things besides the main character.

And Itsuki is behind her, one hundred percent. Whenever she needs advice or a helping hand, he’s always there to give it. Itsuki isn’t too sure of his own abilities as an idol, but the moment his friends need help, he’s there, fighting at their side to support their dreams. She isn’t serving him. He’s supporting her, and not because he wants in her pants. We’ve established that he’s so dense you could use his skull as a hammer. He wants to support her because he’s a damn good friend, the exact kind of friend who you might realistically fall head over heels for.

See what I mean? These aren’t just quirks slapped on top of the trope to disguise that it’s the same thing you’ve already seen a million times. These are additions that fundamentally alter the structure of the archetype. It’s good character writing!

Here’s another one. Stop me if you’ve heard it before. Your group of good friends is going about your business, saving the world, when suddenly an emo stands in your way! He’s cool, suave, powerful, but he won’t tell you why he’s fighting against you. He’s mysterious like that. Eventually, though, you wear him down. He admits that your ‘friendship’ leads to power, more than he could gain on his own, so he joins your team as its last member. The rival becomes a mighty ally.

Sasuke Uchiha called, he wants his angst back. But he won’t be getting it, because Yashiro, the final party member of TMS, is more than just an endlessly angsty buzzkill.

For starters, he doesn’t grouse about being superior after he joins up with you. He’s still confident in his abilities, and rightly so, but he admits that he joined you specifically because he has a lot to learn from your friendship. He doesn’t push you away like any other bitter rival character. He respects you, and he’s not afraid to let you know it.

The game also explores the ramifications of Yashiro’s single-minded pursuit of idol talent in his side stories. As soon as you recruit him, one of them unlocks. You wonder, “This guy has been an elitist prick for the last three chapters. What kind of higher-than-thou drivel will he preach at me before getting slapped by humility?” Curious, you hunt him down, only to find him stuck on the office couch. He says he has run out of energy and needs you to fix it. Uh… what?

Digging further, he says he hasn’t “replenished his energy” in days, since he’s been so busy with his work. Itsuki surmises that he means he hasn’t eaten, which, understandably, shocks him. How could a guy not eat but continue to work for that long? It turns out, the task of acquiring food used to be carried out by his assistant, who his father hired before dying in the Mass Disappearance. Having someone deal with menial affairs left him free to focus on refining his talents. That’s why he’s immeasurably stronger than you early on; the guy has done nothing except practice since the day he learned to walk.

When he joined your company, however, his assistant complained about the shift, so Yashiro chose to fire him instead of giving up his new position. This left him without the person who has “replenished his energy” for him throughout his entire life. He needs your help to learn how to get food for himself.

Let me repeat that. The rival character, who had been besting you at every turn up until now, literally does not know how to feed himself. You need to _teach him_ how restaurants work. (I hereby declare him, Edgy Yusuke.) To his credit, he hears every word of advice readily, and when he starts taking food a bit more seriously, he realizes that there’s a lot of inspiration to be found in the culinary arts. He takes an acting job on a children’s cooking show to explore that angle further, donning a silly purple apron and puffy hat for little kids everywhere. You can then make him wear that outfit into battle, and it’s the best thing ever.

They turned Yashiro into a hilarious instance of the stoic while also exploring the consequences of the single-minded ambition that’s found in every rival character out there. It’s admirable character work. To any aspiring writers out there, one of the best ways to practice writing your own characters is to take a common trope and twist it the same way this game does. Find something hiding between the lines of implication like with Yashiro, or invert the meta-narrative function of the trope like with Tsubasa. It’s a great writing exercise, and you might happen into a new type of character that you can get a lot of mileage out of in your more serious outings.

They even manage to squeeze some blood out of the stone that is the player insert character. Itsuki Aoi is a rather plain young man, as is the standard. His design is handsome in a middling sort of way as to let most men project onto him easily, and everyone around him speaks highly of his leadership skills even though he deflects compliments back onto the talents of the friends he’s helped, walking the line between modesty in the meta-narrative and anxiety in the surface-level story. This is about as bog-standard as it gets for self-insert power fantasies.

However, he shows enough quirks that are uniquely his own to stave off the derisive label of “Protagonist-kun.” As stated earlier, he focuses his energy into making everyone around him shine. He wants Tsubasa to be the star she’s always dreamed of being. He wants Yashiro to be a functional human being who won’t starve to death out of sheer ignorance. All Itsuki wants is for his friends to be happy, and that’s enough to make him happy. It reflects how showmanship isn’t usually a one-man affair. A good show springs from many people pouring their all into a performance. Itsuki taking all the glory for himself, as the very worst self-inserts do, would not function in this setting, so he works to be the glue that holds all these other amazing people together.

On top of the structural shift, he shows enough charm that you’ll be happy to live in his head for the duration of the adventure. He’s a solid straight man to his more eccentric friends’ more bizarre qualities. Is the drunk boss lady tease-flirting with him again? “I must decline.” Boom, dead in the water. Is your coach being a big baby again? Pacify the little shit so his (actually really good) training can continue. Your best dude friend needs help learning to flirt for an acting gig? Well, you don’t know much about that, but **proceeds to effortlessly charm everyone you come across while being totally unaware of doing so**. This freaking goofball is a delight.

I have to say my favorite running quirk of Itsuki’s is just how passionate he is about food. In order to heal yourself up between dungeon runs, you need to eat at cafes, restaurants, and vending machines, each of which has a menu of at least three different items. Each item you eat gets a lovely description from Itsuki, where he espouses the value of cloud-like cake and rich frosting as it carries him to the seventh cloud of heaven. There are also some menu options you unlock in side quests that are meant to be terrible, trend-chasing monstrosities, and the way he describes them makes you think an elder god is rising from the depths to obliterate humanity. You say you’re not good at anything, Itsuki? Give this dumb kid a role on that cooking show! I’d watch the shit out of him reviewing stuff on the Food Network.

He’s still ultimately meant to be the camera through which we experience the world, but he’s among the more charming cameras I’ve operated in a long while. One of his unlockable costumes in the Switch port of the game is Joker’s Thief suit from “Persona 5,” and I’d say he earned the right to that sick longcoat.

I could go on about every other member of the main ensemble, but you get the point by now. All of them play their surface archetypes in interesting, fun ways. When they pull off a sweet flourish in the middle of combat, it’s always thrilling because that’s not just some dude who also wants your common enemy to suck it. That’s Yashiro, the doofus who couldn’t feed himself. Or it’s Touma, showing off the shiny Power Rangers-themed outfit you earned through his side stories. “Tokyo Mirage Sessions” excels at writing party members who you’ll always cheer for, even after their time in the limelight is overshadowed by the main plot.

Could the cast be better? Certainly. While they’re plenty strong in and of themselves, the fact that the main story they’re in is simply alright holds them back. A great story weaves together character beats into a long, winding tapestry, but TMS has to put its main plot on hold so you can explore its characters in optional side quests. Even so, those side quests manage to be an enjoyable motivator that keeps you playing the game. Nailing your cast can forgive many blunders elsewhere.

And yet, for the four pages of praise I just battered you over the head with, the greater consensus remains stuck on the main plot alone. “Play the game, skip the story.” Do people remember Tsubasa’s long road towards ascending stardom, or the quirky way she dismantles the childhood best friend trope? Nope. “Skip the story.” Does anyone talk about how much fun the flip of Yashiro’s character is after he joins your side and you get a look at the utter lack of personal skills hiding under his talent? Nope. “Skip the story.” Does anyone remember a single lovable quip from the food-loving Itsuki? Nope. “Skip the story.”

Common parlance has a way of sanding down the nuance of a topic. This applies to more than just media, for the record, but we’ll stick with media for the sake of not doubling my word count. Reviewers may feel pressured to summarize their opinions on a game down to a few easily remembered bullet points for the sake of reaching a wider, impatient audience. The reliance on numeric review scores is a symbol of that simplification. Even when reviewers do go into detail, though, those extras are lost over time in a game of net-wide telephone. So, they focus down on what people want to know.

People wanted to know if the game’s story lives up to Shin Megami Tensei or Fire Emblem.

It does not.

Reviewers say it does not.

That’s what people remember.

I urge you to not become part of the obscuring chain. There’s not much that writers can do on this front, but for anyone out there who loves talking about what they watch or play, take some time to go into detail on it. Did some special effects work better than others? Point it out. Are some sets more interesting than others? Discuss it. And, for the love of Shakespeare, do not boil down an entire story’s worth of writing into a three word blurb. Plot, characters, flow, themes, fun set pieces, these are all things that fall under the umbrella of a work’s writing, and they all play a part in how good the overall package is. Don’t let a golden cog go unrecognized because one of the gears next to it squeaks a little.

There are a lot of other generalizations in critique I could point out and analyze here, but I’ll save it for another time. I’ll need a few more good examples to call on before I tear the phrase “Mary Sue” to bloody shreds for your enjoyment and education. You know, unless you want me to just restate a much more venerable critic’s views on the term.

If you need a hot take on it right now because it’s a snag in your work that you’re troubled by, hit me up in the comments. I’m more than happy to give advice on a person-by-person basis if you think I’ve got it. Who knows? Maybe your question will get me to look into a particular topic deep enough to inspire a whole chapter of the Writing Desk. Storytelling is a social activity at the end of the day. The buck doesn’t stop at me. Take it and run wild to your heart’s content.

But for now, I think I already have my next talking point in mind. What might it be, you ask? You’ll just have to rattle your Skulls on that Mystery.


	2. Creativity and Cheat Sheets - Scooby-Doo, Mystery Skulls Animated

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "You do remember who I am, right?"
> 
> "Every time I look in the mirror."

I love Scooby-Doo.

That’s probably the least controversial statement ever stated, but it bears repeating. The cowardly Great Dane is a cornerstone of my, and many kids’, childhoods. My personal show of choice is “What’s New Scooby-Doo.” Going beyond nostalgia, it’s a great mix of classic cartoon escapades with a tongue-in-cheek awareness of how silly the series has always been.

Choosing a singular Scooby show to wear that crown is a pretty tough decision, though, mostly because there are more clones of it than stars in the sky. I’m not talking about all the new versions of the old pooch that hit the airwaves over the decades, at least not entirely. No, I’m looking at the guys who tried to muscle in on Scoobert’s territory after seeing how big a slice of pie he found in the haunted mansion’s kitchen. An original idea doesn’t stay original for long, they say, especially when it’s successful. The funny thing, though, is that most of the major clones were made by the same company behind Scooby-Doo itself, Hanna-Barbera.

Animation in the 70s was a strange, experimental era. It was among the first times where animation was commercially available on widespread, televised time slots. The medium was in high demand, but, at the same time, it was highly expensive to produce. When you struck success in the field, it only made sense for businesses to get as much out of the gold mine as they could before it collapsed. Hanna-Barbera’s method of choice, when they saw how much money Scooby-Doo made, was to flood the market with Scooby-Duplicates. If kids watched this show, surely they would also eat up this new show that was just like it. And this one. And this one. And this one.

Does anyone here remember “The Funky Phantom?” No? Okay, well, how about “Goobert and the Ghost Chasers?” Uh… “Jabberjaw?” Yes! Okay, there’s one. Except, you probably remember it best from the appearance the titular shark made in the 2010 Scooby series “Mystery Incorporated.” With him were the mascots from “Speed Buggy,” “Captain Caveman,” and the previously mentioned “Funky Phantom” in a crossover episode meant to pay homage to the company’s past.

I say their past, specifically, because few of these shows are still on the air. Those shows meant to copy Scoob’s success only ended up as small baubles lining his own legacy, which continues with new iterations to this day. How did they fail using a formula proven by a franchise that’s still chugging along five decades later?

But you all saw the chapter’s title. We’re not just discussing Scooby-Doo here. There’s another show, of a sort, that pulled a lot of blatant inspiration from Scooby-Doo. And yet, this one saw massive success despite doing nothing at all to hide how heavily its foundation drew from a preexisting source. How did it take home gold when everyone else branching off the same mine found only gravel? How did “Mystery Skulls Animated” accrue nearly a hundred million views across its four episodes, with a fanbase that remains strong despite gaps of multiple years between entries?

Now, this would be where I summarize MSA for the discussion going forward, but I feel like that would be an insult to it. For those who don’t know, the series is structured as animation set to a bunch of catchy songs by the Mystery Skulls band. With that music’s lyrics filling the air, storytelling is largely left to visual cues and how certain actions line up with pointed sections in the track. Describing how it all adds up in words, like I would do, just isn’t good enough.

So, before we continue, I ask any readers who haven’t seen all four episodes of “Mystery Skulls Animated” to go and do so now. They’re free to watch on Youtube, on the MysteryBen27 channel, and weigh in at a collective twenty minutes. Start with “Ghost.” I swear, it’s worth every second. As for those who have already seen it, watch it again. You probably know that there’s so much detail jammed into every entry that you can always pick up something new from another run through the breach.

Oh, but don’t worry about the extra reading that Mystery Ben has provided on the world. We won’t be digging into that. The only thing you should know is everyone’s names. Since the characters very rarely speak, it’s up to extra material to tell you what their names are. So, the guy in yellow and orange is Arthur. The blue girl is Vivi. The purple dude is Lewis. And the dog is Mystery.

Okay, here’s the official break. Go, watch it, and come back a more enriched soul.

-

We all on the same page now? Good. Then I can do my thing.

Right off the bat, the direct analogues to Scooby-Doo are so blatant as to mark “Ghost” as a parody of classic Scooby. Arthur is obviously Shaggy, Vivi is Velma, Lewis is Fred, and you know who Mystery is. They’re teens solving mysteries in an iconic van. The surface stuff is all here. So, where’s the depth that makes MSA stand out as its own beast when the rest were but mewling kittens?

It’s important to recognize that taking a premade base is an obvious shortcut. You are, in essence, using a platform that someone else put together as a starting point for your own work. Ideally, this should facilitate an allocation of effort to somewhere else in the product. If you’re saving energy by not making your own roots, it doesn’t mean that you get to pocket the difference. What you shave off needs to appear somewhere else that the audience can see, otherwise you will be a knockoff that’s worth skipping in favor of the thing you’re copying. What does your show provide that isn’t already present in its inspiration?

For many of the old Hanna-Barbera clones, not much. The animation in all of them is on-par with Scooby. (That is to say, kind of stiff and awkward as was the norm with televised animation back then.) The writing is on-par with Scooby. (That is to say, with more cheese than the state of Wisconsin.) They all tell the same types of stories as Scooby. (That is to say, teens solving mysteries/crimes with the help of a quirky, non-human mascot.) Most of them are just, Scooby again. If you’ve never seen the original show, you’ll probably like them just fine, but if you are familiar with Scooby-Doo, you’ll probably get bored of them pretty quickly since they’re just the same mold over and over again. It’s like if a single show dragged on for a dozen seasons while never advancing its material.

There are a few exceptions to be found, though. “Josie and the Pussycats,” for one, followed a traveling rock band that solved mysteries along the way. The groovy group here has a greater ear for music than their contemporaries, meaning that their show, naturally, has more tunes to hum along with. Using that saved effort from the planning phase to produce quality songs is a good trade. This is one I can approve of. And, wouldn’t you know it, this is one of the few that got a followup series shortly after the first and a reboot movie in the early 2000s. Even if neither of them were great, according to online reviews, the mere presence of these continuations puts the first run of Josie ahead of the curve.

Where the effort moved to in MSA is plain on the paper. That art style! That animation! That smart storytelling!

...Ahem, let’s try that again with, like, fifty percent less geeking out.

The art direction in the series is immediately recognizable and well-defined within itself. You can tell at a glance that many base concepts came from Scooby-Doo, but they’re given flairs that paint a very different direction. Look at the glasses on Vivi. Their small size and purple lenses clarify quickly that these aren’t visual aids for her, they’re a fashion piece. That she isn’t visually impaired and that she cares enough about her appearance to wear fashion glasses sets her apart from her inspiration, Velma, succinctly. We’ll talk about more deeply-rooted differences in this vein later, but keep in mind this running thread; while the Mystery Skulls parallel Scooby’s characters, they are not direct clones.

The most standout element of the art style, though, is its strong use of color. Everything is made a bright shade in a way that pops without ever feeling like total color mayhem. There’s a nice mix of warm and cool that balances out the frame. It dazzles the eye without overwhelming it. (For an example of what too much color looks like, take a glance at the Cartoon Network show “The Problem Solverz.” Just a glance, though. More than that might actually hurt.) This focus on brighter hues sets a more bouncy tone than the darker shades of bright colors used in classic Scooby-Doo.

Speaking of bounce, the way the animation syncs up with its music is another point towards MSA’s unique identity. You notice quickly that everyone’s heads bob along with the beat, which is both a pleasing way to make what you see and hear meld together and a show of how carefully each frame of animation was timed. Even in “Ghost,” where the movements are more stiff than later episodes, that constant beat lends a pleasing energy to the flow. It’s downright hypnotic at times.

Both art style and how it moves pour into the real star of the show: how it tells its story within its constraints. As said before, there’s almost no speaking in these four episodes. Everything it wants to tell you is said through lively expressions and actions, perfect timing with certain lyrics, and color choice.

For a quick example of that last one, look at the team’s van. Unlike the Mystery Machine, the Mystery Skulls’ van is yellow and orange. It certainly makes it stand out better in the dark outside shots, but you might realize that it’s the exact same color pallet used by Arthur. His yellow hair and orange jacket are striking visuals, almost as much as his mechanical left arm. Arthur is the team’s mechanic. That’s _his_ van. This is all said more certainly in “Hellbent,” where he’s fixing it in the opening, but it’s shown through color choice almost as soon as the first episode starts.

Every character having their own color scheme feeds into both the appealing visuals and the storytelling. If something has the same colors as a character, it is connected to that character.

The opening also shows MSA’s use of lyrical lineup in short order. An early line in the song “Ghost” reads, “It’s alright ‘cuz I’m with friends.” This is played over Arthur, Vivi, and Mystery looking at each other and smiling. Pretty simple, yeah? It should be. It’s establishing a theme.

Later in the episode, when Lewis’s ghost first emerges from his tomb, he points at Arthur with a scowl as the line “But it’s you I hate the most” is sung. You would expect a ghost in a spooky mansion to haunt anyone who enters their domain. Paying attention only to what you see might say as much here, that the ghost is only chasing Arthur because he’s a trespasser. But that line clarifies, long before the flashback, that Lewis’s rage is directed solely at Arthur. Character motivations are underscored in chilling fashion by the music, showing that they lend more than just a rhythm and general tone to any given episode. Here’s a few test lines from up and down the series that play to the same effect.

“I’ve lost my spell.”

“Hellbent on drugs ‘cuz they turn you on. I don’t give a damn. Mmm~”

“Did you ever really think that I’d become someone you’d call your enemy?”

All of this effort poured into the style and substance of MSA more than makes up what is saved by using Scooby-Doo as a base. It may borrow broad character designs and circumstances, but it’s using them to a much different effect through very different means.

There is one other point that should be applied to both MSA and the more direct copies of Scooby-Doo. A big criticism of clones or bad parodies is that they just want to make a quick buck off the original’s popularity. It rings of a CEO or hackjob artist seeing another property’s success, pointing at it, and saying, “I want that.” It’s cold, cloying, and entirely blatant to anyone who has seen the original work. One of the best ways to shake off that coldness is to show that you understand what made it tick in the first place. It’s easy to snag surface elements to curtain over your work. It’s another thing entirely to incorporate elements that would only be appreciated by someone who knows the source material well.

Most of the old Hanna-Barbera clones didn’t really show this love in their production. The goal was to make shows like Scooby that kids would watch alongside it. Referencing directly back to him in a meaningful way would be a tip of the hand, exposing more plainly that the motive behind these shows was mostly cynical.

I find it funny that Scooby-Doo later referenced these shows with the respect they failed to pay him. Remember when I said that four of the cloned mascots appeared in an episode of “Mystery Incorporated?” The reason they got together was because of a celebration centered around crime solving groups. (Well, technically it was part of a fever dream that Scooby was under, but the in-dream story was of a celebration.) That alone is the writers chuckling at how those shows all aped on Scooby’s shtick. But instead of being mean about the copying, the episode instead faithfully revived these characters, their gags, and even brought back their old voice actors to reprise the roles where possible. There’s some effort and heart behind the references here, making that episode in particular one I look back on fondly. (For further examples of the sort, I hear that the remake of “Ducktales” is up to its gills in them.)

With “Mystery Skulls Animated,” the matter is shifted to the side a bit by the fact that it’s more of a direct parody. You expect certain elements of old Scooby to be referenced outright, but how they’re used can vary wildly, which then impacts the quality of the show.

Let’s pretend we’re writing a bad parody. We want Scooby’s success, or to use his face to draw people in. We want a big splash for minimal effort. The most obvious way to do so would be to crack jokes about things seen in Scooby-Doo. So we would do something like, say, point to how much Shaggy and Scooby eat all the damn time and write a skit about how they should be fat. Insert fat jokes for five minutes, and we’re done. Easy! Or, secondary idea (which we could easily pair with the first), what if the criminals in the monster costumes actually wanted to kill the gang instead of the child-friendly spooking off they were originally aiming for? That last one was actually a joke used in “Robot Chicken,” a show built on diving directly to the bottom of the barrel with admirable aplomb. How low they went was itself the joke.

So then, how does MSA, which I’ve praised to high heaven, use direct references to Scooby-Doo? It opts for a more subtle approach than the above bad examples. Instead of using riffs on old elements to draw in and shock the audience, it instead uses little twists on them to build up its own unique narrative.

The thrust of the references are all in the first episode of MSA, “Ghost,” but just about all of them tie into the story going forward. First, let’s look at that classic hallway gag. Characters run in and out of parallel doors up and down a hallway in impossible ways, run into the monster coming out of one of the doors unexpectedly, then run out of the loop in fear. It’s that vintage Scooby we all love.

Take a step back now and ask, who is Lewis, the pursuing monster in this scene, chasing? He looks to be chasing all of the Skulls, but we know, from the outside, that he’s only chasing Arthur. He has no beef with Vivi or Mystery, but for the gang, that tidbit is obscured because he looks like he’s chasing all of them at the same time. The chaos of the hallway gag, which was originally an absurdist joke, is used to exemplify the dramatic irony soaking MSA to its bones. That the hallway gag is otherwise played straight in itself shows a level of deference to its source, which knowing fans might appreciate. I certainly do.

This scene is prefixed by another classic gag, two characters making sandwiches in the supposedly haunted and abandoned mansion’s kitchen. Shaggy and Scooby are contractually obligated to make a sandwich whenever they see a fridge. Great stuff, and it totally fits that a loving parody would use this scene at least once.

Except, it’s not the Scooby and Shaggy counterpoints making the sandwiches. It’s Mystery and Vivi, who is linked to Velma. Is this just a substitution made so we could get that (cool as hell) scene of Lewis waking up and raging against Arthur? No. It’s fully intentional, and it says something that reinforces the surface-level narrative.

Looking at the portrait flashback, and the shots of Lewis’s thoughts from “Hellbent” two episodes later, Arthur is something of a third wheel in the group. Vivi and Lewis were dating when he was alive, and this creates clear envy in Arthur. He sees Lewis getting all the attention and grows jealous, which then lets the green fog in the cave possess him. Arthur’s division from the group leads directly to Lewis’s death.

But he shouldn’t be divided. He’s Shaggy, so he obviously has Scooby! Scoob is his best friend! Except not, because Arthur is not just Shaggy, and Mystery is not his dog. That sandwich gag shows a stronger bond between Mystery and Vivi. He’s Vivi’s dog. In fact, look closely at those two’s character designs. They’re both wearing glasses that sit low on their noses, leaving their eyes fully exposed. It rings to me that she chose both of their wardrobes to match.

Shaggy and Scooby were in their own little bubble in the old show, something that is joked about in later iterations fairly often. They were fine because they had each other, and that was enough for them, but Arthur? Arthur didn’t have any of that. He served as the group’s mechanic, hence why he was there, but socially, he was an outcast. The change made to the classic sandwich gag reinforces a critical plot point in a subtle way.

There’s one more old element I want to point out here. It’s a bit more theoretical than the last two, but after hearing this theory from other MSA fans, I’m convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt. Once in every episode of Scooby-Doo, Mystery Inc. would separate into groups to widen their investigation. “Let’s split up and search for clues.” From there, Scooby and Shaggy would go one way, and Fred, Daphne, and Velma would go the other. The few times that the group splits up a different way in “What’s New Scooby-Doo,” it’s the setup for a joke, and they agree to go back to the normal split up next time.

There’s a split up in that portrait flashback, when the Mystery Skulls were whole. The cave branched in two directions, so they split into two groups. If this were like old Scooby, Arthur and Mystery would go one way, Lewis and Vivi the other. That doesn’t really make sense with how the group dynamics are given, though. Both Mystery and Vivi are more connected to Lewis, so they would probably gravitate towards him over Arthur, leaving the mechanic alone. How do they split up instead?

Lewis goes with Arthur. Or more accurately, the other way around since Arthur hides behind Lewis up until they reach the cliff. You could say it’s another choice of convenience so they’re both together and alone for the possession and murder, but I disagree. Vivi and Mystery teaming up rings true with what I’ve already said, with Mystery being Vivi’s dog. The people writing this thing tend not to make story calls out of convenience. There’s a reason for every character to behave the way they do. So why would Lewis choose to go with Arthur instead of the girlfriend he loves so much as to keep a picture of her in his heart locket after death?

Lewis cares about Arthur that much. He knows that Arthur is a coward of the highest order, while Vivi and Mystery are excited by the paranormal and suitably cautious yet prepared to encounter it, respectively. Arthur is there to fix things, not hunt ghosts. So Lewis, being a big, loving softy, lets Arthur hide behind him in case things go wrong. Arthur might think he was a third wheel all that time, but Lewis genuinely cared about him and looked out for him when he could. Lewis, at least, considered him a good friend.

And now, the person who wants to hurt Arthur most is Lewis himself.

It’s a dynamic that’s largely theoretical, I repeat, but the revelation of what was actually in Lewis’s locket as of “The Future” supports it pretty handily. After he pulls himself back from trying to murder Arthur, his heart is blasted off him, and Arthur picks it up while he’s distracted. Arthur opens it, and the picture inside changes into one of the whole team. Lewis, Vivi, Mystery, and, you guessed it, Arthur. Lewis was blinded by rage and a lack of information about what really killed him, but deep down, he still cared enough about Arthur to hold him in his literal heart.

That shift to the split up in the first episode foreshadowed it six years before the big reveal. A crucial part of Lewis’s character was hidden in a small change to an element borrowed from Scooby-Doo. Being able to carefully pull it apart to nestle their own story inside is a massive show of respect, and it proves to me that the intent was always to tell a unique story about envy and rage instead of coming from a real life story of envy and rage. It’s as ironic as it is beautiful.

The line between taking inspiration from another work and ripping it off is found somewhere between intent and execution. If your intent is to take something’s success, it will always poke through. If you’re taking inspiration from it to tell a story that’s all your own, you need to prove it, clear as day, for everyone to see. And if you’re so close to the original that it’s obvious at a glance, like with a parody, a show of genuine affection for and understanding of what you’re taking inspiration from will always be appreciated. “Mystery Skulls Animated” is the gold standard.

You probably figured out by now that this was all mostly my way of talking about MSA in an informative way. Hopefully my own love and understanding shined through. That drop of “The Future” last month stoked the flames in me something fierce, and the series as a whole does so much right, I knew there would be some great lessons to pick through.

Not to discount Scooby-Doo’s presence here, of course. I’ve always loved that goofy dog. Maybe I’ll give him a more focused spotlight later by looking at how its many new iterations over the years have tried to evolve the franchise, for better and worse. I doubt I’ll be able to cover every single Scooby show when that day comes, though. Fifty years of programming is a tough pill to swallow, let alone condense into a reasonably-sized essay.

That comes later, though. I’m not sure what I’ll be talking about next, but I hope it’s as worth your time as ever. Thanks for reading!


	3. Healthy and Gay - Ikenfell

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As any gym fanatic can tell you, good rep form is important. You don't want to throw out your back, do you?

There sure are a lot of gay pairings in fandom. For just about every property I might look up fanfics for, about half of their front page results have gay ships. I’m not complaining, mind you. Have you seen my body of work? When I say, “Fanfiction readers and writers love their gay content,” I’m counting myself with you lot.

When you step outside of fandom spaces, though, the gay gets a lot more thin on the ground. Of all your favorite gay ships, how many of them are actually canon in the base work? No, not implied, not teased, none of that. Outright canon. I’d wager not a whole lot.

Some people might say we’re in a golden age of LGBT representation these days. While things are a lot better now than they used to be, I have to say, there’s a lot more to be done. Many of the kingpins people point to when they talk about rep in mainstream media… Well, I find them lacking. Many of them are lacking for similar reasons.

Now, I could bring them out one-by-one and paddle them for their sins, but I prefer taking an upbeat spin on things where possible. Besides, I’d end up repeating myself on a whole lot of talking points that way. Instead, I’ve found a gem in the indie game rough that takes all of the errors I hate in LGBT rep and punts them into the sun. Ladies, gents, enby’s and so on, I welcome you to “Ikenfell.” (Hey look, a main title I don’t have to abbreviate for once!)

The plot of the game is rather simple at its core. You are Maritte, a magicless Ordinary in a world where most of the population are magically gifted witches. (Yes, all magic users are witches. That’s not actually a historically gendered term. Look it up.) One summer, Maritte grows concerned that she hasn’t heard from her sister, Safina, who attends a magic school called Ikenfell. She normally returns home during vacation, but she didn’t this year. Worried for her troublesome sister, Maritte heads to the witchy world of Ikenfell to find her.

When she gets close to the school, however, a wave of power washes over the land, and Maritte suddenly finds herself gifted with pyromancy, a form of magic that’s never been seen. Something is amiss, and the strange magic effect seems to have rippled out from Ikenfell itself. Armed with new magic and endless questions, Maritte dives into a tangled web of lies, ambition, trauma, and guilt to find out what happened to her and her sister.

Along the way, she recruits a band of six merry pals in total, including herself, and here’s where the praise begins. The amount of diversity in your small playable cast alone is staggering. Let’s start with your first recruit, Petronella. When you get to the woods in which Ikenfell resides, you find out quickly that the teleportation gate to enter isn’t working from your side. Maritte may be a witch now, but she doesn’t know this magic. She finds a small village outside the school’s walls and speaks to its tavern owner. He directs you to a student who was locked outside of the premises when things started rolling downhill. Or, as he puts it, “But now they’re stuck out here with the rest of us.”

Yep. _They_. Nel might look like a girl at a glance, but they’re nonbinary (they/them). Right off the bat, you have a criminally underrepresented piece of the pie as your second party member and your best healer. What’s better, for me at least, they’re also aromantic. Nel is dedicated to their alchemy work. Let me tell you. Seeing a fellow aro/ace join the party, I felt acknowledged. It’s a damn fine feeling.

And it’s one you’ll probably get a lot more of as you go along. Maritte? A redhead who is low key gay, but more focused on finding her sister at the moment. We just covered Nel, and you get Rook shortly after. He’s also nonbinary, but he prefers male pronouns. Just don’t call him “dude.” That one’s too far for him. Just like that, these two characters help stretch what being nonbinary means for a possibly unfamiliar audience.

Furthermore, Rook is one of your two black party members. Along with gender identity and orientation, there’s some varied racial rep here, too. Some of the other mainstream rep choices that came before “Ikenfell” tried to vary things up, too, but a few fumbled and accidentally said and did some really dodgy stuff. I’m charitably believing that it was accidental in most cases, since the big offender here was produced by a racially diverse team, so for the sake of this essay, let’s keep my ribbing on this problem elsewhere slim.

Back to the positives! Your fourth recruit is Pertisia, a wealthy, snowy white girl who is first depicted as more than a little stuck up and snooty. You know the sort. At least, you know the basic mold. Remember what I said a while back? How taking a common archetype and pulling it apart to get at its innards is a great way to design characters? Let’s just say that the game dissects exactly why Pertisia is so abrasive when you first meet her and leave it there for now. Spoiler alert, she might be my favorite character of the bunch. Oh, and she’s also gay. Almost forgot that part.

Ima comes in as a strong fifth recruit and the other black character I mentioned. With a repertoire of art-based magic that packs a wallop and a few slow-acting health regeneration spells, you’d do well to keep zir if you prefer your healers with a bit of punch.

No, that wasn’t a typo. Ima also disavows standard gender duality. Ze/Zir, if you would be so kind to Ikenfell’s youngest professor. I personally preferred Nel’s raw healing to Ima’s mixed approach, but either way should serve you fine.

Last, but definitely not least, we have Gilda! You meet her right before you recruit Rook when she challenges you to a duel with her lightning spells, another brand-new form of magic. She sees that Maritte’s packing the fresh stuff, too, and Gilda goes starry-eyed at the thought of dancing all over the competition and proving herself the best of the new wave. It helps, if that’s the right word, that she’s “ _so_ gay” for Maritte. And, lest we forget, her boss music is an absolute _jam_.

I admit, my eye isn’t perfectly perceptive, but I don’t think Gilda’s white. The artwork of her I’ve found from the devs shows her with skin that’s a nudge too dark to just be tanned, but I could be wrong. I suppose pinning a nationality to it in a world that doesn’t have real-world nations would be pedantic, though, so suffice to say, you’ve got a colorful lot on this journey in more ways than one.

That’s just your playable cast, too. You run into a lovely swathe of interesting, unique characters, many of whom stand out despite not being named or only appearing in one scene. Of all the side characters, my favorite is definitely Ibn Oxley, a foppish witch sent by the coven (think a magical government sort of group) to investigate what’s happening. He’s utterly ineffectual despite being called the most powerful mage around, but his bodyguard/boyfriend Bax will fuck your shit up if you hurt his Ibn. And Raven help you if you hurt Bax.

Now, you see all that variety up there? You see how vibrant the cast is? Yeah? Know what you don’t see? Vague implications.

I hate, hate, hate it when a story decides it needs to hide its gays behind euphemism. I know writers are a flowery bunch more often than not, but sometimes, you should call a spade a spade. You should call a girlfriend a girlfriend. You know what I find downright galling? The very first gay wedding ever in a children’s cartoon never once called either of the girls involved a “wife.” What’s more, though the two clearly loved each other whenever they were on screen together, they never once uttered the phrase, “I love you,” across the entire show. You know what would be really good for representing a gay relationship? Actually using the language associated with a gay relationship. Words have power. Don’t try to be clever with it. Be direct.

“Ikenfell” is very direct with its LGBT characters. Petronella is established as “they” in the first reference to them. Rook says he’s nonbinary the first time he meets Safina in a flashback. They don’t dance around the bush before calling Ima “ze.” The world of “Ikenfell” is full of whimsy, but none of it ever obscures the rep.

But at the same time, it doesn’t stare agape at the rep either. In its directness, “Ikenfell” is also quick. You go by “they?” Cool. Time to break into the school. They’ll never see us coming.

Hey, I think that girl’s cute, and now that I’m ready to deal with my personal trauma, I’m going to ask her out.

Don’t call me dude. “Oh, sorry. As I was saying…”

For all the kinds of people and preferences you meet along the way, none of them are ever treated like sideshow freaks. In this world, some people go by non-standard pronouns, and that’s just a part of life.

Representation has two main goals. First, making people in a non-standard group feel welcomed. That’s part of why it’s so important to use such simple phrases as, “I love you,” directly. It signals that it’s safe to be as open with your affection as a hetero couple gets to be without a second thought. Don’t make your audience feel like they have to hide behind obscuring language. Make them feel normal in their own skin. Which brings us to our second point: normalization.

Art has a way of crossing divides between us, you know? Seeing a solid representation of, say, nonbinary people might help us cis folks understand them better. Meeting Nel, who I shared common ground with in our aromanticism, helped me get a better grasp on using they/them as casually as I would he or she. I admit, my goldfish memory needed the practice. Especially so with Ima’s pronouns, which took me a few lines too many to realize were pronouns at all. I am the most dense smart person you’ll ever meet, but I’m working on it.

Just like all of these characters are working on themselves. Let’s take a quick aside to something serious here. Multiple studies have found that the LGBT community is affected by certain mental illnesses more often than is proportional. I can say from experience, depression is a bitch. A game about a largely LGBT cast would appeal to its main audience well by handling the topic with respect.

The single most respectful part of it all is that it doesn’t link the conditions directly to gender identity or orientation. I’m going to say this plainly for anyone who needs to hear it. You are not broken. It’s not your fault that you’re depressed, or that you’re stuck with anxiety, or that you hate your own image. It’s not your fault.

How many zealots warping their own religion to fit their bigotry, who had no business raising children, found out their kids were trans and sent them off to conversion camp? How many people grew up in an era where you could be lynched for liking another man? Fuck, who has to worry about the government defining them out of existence with bullshit bills that don’t pay heed to the science of gender dysphoria or those who were born with biology between male and female?

None of that is your fault.

For many such mental illnesses, an environmental trigger is necessary. A source of stress that causes conditions in the brain to snap out of place. Many things can act as that trigger, but any of the above would hit the button, and with it ingrain in the victim the idea that what they’re feeling is because of who or what they are.

It’s not _your_ fault. It’s _their_ fault. Fuck ‘em.

Am I crystal clear on that point? Good. No one deserves to feel like they’re broken because of what someone else did to them.

With all that being said, it’s still the case that we’re left with a mess of emotional turmoil to mop up. We could use an example of how to deal with it the right way. And hey, a lot of cis people deal with the same conditions. Covering them well is another point towards building bridges. Bonus. How does “Ikenfell” handle it? By using triggers that aren’t specifically tied to any character’s orientation.

Gilda was a witch well before the game’s events, but before she received lightning, she couldn’t grasp how to use magic well at all. One flashback shows an alchemical rune blowing up in her face in the middle of class. Safina laughs at her for it, and though the teacher chides Safina and encourages Gilda’s efforts, it’s clear that the mockery hit her hard. She’s stuck feeling like the butt of the joke, like an inferior person to her peers. It’s one in a series of failures that never stopped coming.

When she realizes she can use magic that no one else has, she’s ecstatic. Finally, she’s special! She’s worthwhile! And she thinks she can prove it by beating Maritte, the sister of the girl who mocked her, in a fair fight. But, she can’t. Three times she fails. Once against Maritte and Nel, once against just Maritte, and once as part of a messy, cluster of a fight. She loses each and every time.

After the third loss, she breaks down, admitting defeat for the last time. Ima goes up to her and talks her through what she’s feeling. Even after all of Gilda’s hard work, after mastering a whole new kind of magic, she’s still not as good as Safina, who mocked her? As Maritte, who’s only been a witch for a day? Why does everyone love them, but not her? What’s she lacking?

Ima tells her that the power she wants isn’t worth it if you let it be your only focus. At this stage in the game, it’s come to light that Safina lied to everyone about a lot, and her lies have put the entire world at risk. Petronella and Rook, Saf’s old friends, are hurt. Maritte is inconsolable. This is what blind power gets.

But power with a purpose? That’s more than useful. It’s exactly what they need, and Ima happens to know an amazing lightning witch who could help them save the world. Gilda realizes that, yeah, there is something she could do! She does have a use! By helping her expand her focus outside of the hole she buried herself in, Ima pulls Gilda to her feet and begins to undo her self-doubt.

Ima zirself has a small arc to work through, too. Ze’s the youngest professor in Ikenfell, but ze’s also a student. Ze’s so accomplished, ze achieved a teaching job before graduating at all. The flip side to zir high track record, however, is a creeping anxiety. After coming so far, what if ze starts to fall back? What if the responsibility is too much? What if ze fails everyone who believed in zir?

Ze’s largely the most grounded person on your team, but ze’s not without zir worries. And that’s okay. Ze’s no less respected for zir doubts. If anything, that ze continues to be a beacon and invaluable aid to your whole party while also dealing with zir own issues makes zir even more respectable. You might not always believe in yourself, but that’s okay. You can still accomplish great things.

Of everyone’s stories, my favorite is Pertisia’s, by a mile. Which is no small feat, considering how much I adore this whole team! Before I dig into her business, though, I should say that the way it unfolds across the entire game is a beautiful thing. It’s easily the most complex story “Ikenfell” wants to tell. I’ll do my best to explain it, but seeing it firsthand is always preferable. So, we’re doing a scene break here for _super_ spoilers. If “Ikenfell” sounds like it’s up your alley, go ahead and jump to after the next break. It’s on all the main consoles and PC for, like, twenty bucks, plus the Xbox Game Pass (at time of writing) if you’ve got it. If you trust me to tell her story anyway, let’s continue.

-

You first meet Pertisia in a flashback, where she’s talking about ratting Safina out to the teachers for some of her trouble making. She’s presented as a typical meangirl character at first. Since I’ve already told you that Saf has a few more skeletons in her closet than she lets on, though, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Perty’s more nuanced than she appears.

Actually, let’s talk about her appearance first. She looks about as pomp and pretty as the role demands, but I noticed that her character portrait was… a little off. Especially when it animates to look down, I saw that her left eye sags lower than the right. The art had otherwise been clean and symmetrical up to that point, so it couldn’t be an oversight, right? I just tried to ignore it, telling myself it was symbolic of her superiority being a facade or something of the sort. (I was partially right, but, later.)

You meet her properly while you’re trying to get into Safina’s dorm room to look for clues surrounding her disappearance. There’s a magic barrier that you need to break to get in, and you find a book that details the spell Safina used to make the barrier. Just as you’re starting to progress with it, a white cat swoops in, takes the book, and runs deeper into the library, down into a hidden basement that no one seems to have been in for a long time.

No one except for Pertisia, who the cat leads you to. Well, more accurately, you’re lead to a mirror… in which Pertisia is trapped. She says that Safina did it to her, and that she’ll help you break the barrier if you smash her out of the mirror. Maritte is hesitant at first since she still believes in Saf at this point and doesn’t trust Pertisia, who Petronella and Rook both say was an enemy of Saf’s. They don’t have any other leads on how to get in there, though, so Maritte agrees and jailbreaks Pertisia from the mirror. She then joins your party.

Except, it’s more of a half-recruitment because you can’t control Pertisia’s actions in battle. This stands out because no other party member in the entire game behaves this way. You have full control of everyone else from the moment they join. Is she just that haughty, to deny orders in battle?

Whatever. At least she holds up her end of the bargain, if only because she thinks Safina is putting the school in danger and wants to stop her. She agrees with the group’s working theory, that Maritte can trick the barrier into thinking she’s her sister by wearing Saf’s clothes, but she says what they really need is her cloak. Which was stolen by a monster thief called the Snatcher, who lives deep underground and is unreachable by normal means. Fortunately, Pertisia has a way in.

Backing up a little, the way you initially get into Ikenfell (broken gate, remember?) is through a magic shortcut that Saf made. It’s a blood magic hole that, when activated by Safina’s blood, lets the user and anyone touching them enter a tunnel outside of the world as we know it, a place called the Unseen. You are warned, however, to not make any noise while in that dark, void-like space, because doing so attracts a monstrous mass of dark matter that will try to tear you apart. It almost catches up to you the first time you go through the tunnel, and it is _scary_. Like the darkness itself wants to eat you whole. So, best not stay in there for long.

In the present time, Pertisia leads you to her family’s private storage space in the high-class dorms, where she has another blood magic entrance that leads to the Snatcher’s lair. Wait, if she hates Saf so much, why does she have one of Saf’s portals in there? She refuses to answer, naturally. It’s more important for you to get back on Saf’s trail than dig answers out of Pertisia anyway.

Maritte drips some blood on the portal, and your group zips into the deep dark Unseen. Pertisia… doesn’t take it well. At all. As soon as you land in there, she nearly buckles over and loses her breath, but forces herself to move. She keeps locking up, though, and she’s sweating profusely.

You’re almost at the exit when the creature draws near, and Pertisia has a full-on panic attack. She screams that it’s coming. She loses the strength to stand. She can barely speak. The haughty, demanding Pertisia shatters completely at this thing’s presence. Maritte tries to talk her through it at first, but time’s running out. The beast is coming. So, against Perty’s demands for them to not touch her, Maritte grabs her and drags her the last stretch of the tunnel. You barely escape.

In the entrance of the Snatcher’s lair, Perty sits by herself in the corner, quiet. Rook and Nel want to say something to her, but they don’t think they can. Not with the history between the three of them. Maritte goes over in their stead, and she apologizes. Pertisia doesn’t understand why. Maritte says she’s sorry for grabbing her against her wishes, but that she didn’t have a choice. She wasn’t going to leave Perty behind.

This eases her out of her catatonia. She giggles to herself and tells Maritte that she’s sweet, unlike her sister. She gathers herself, then apologizes for making Maritte trouble over her. Maritte tells her it’s okay, that it wasn’t her fault and that she doesn’t have to explain herself if she doesn’t want to. This is when Pertisia properly joins your group.

Even so, a lot is implied here. Something about that creature traumatized her at a point before the game, so much so that even the idea of seeing it again leaves her in a wreck. Furthermore, her distancing Maritte from her sister in her mind leads directly to her letting Maritte tell her what to do in battle. What did Safina do that was so bad as to make Pertisia distrust anything related to her?

True to Maritte’s word, they don’t pry about it. You only find out much later, right before you start the final dungeon. The way in is barred by a sea of thorned vines that would shred them if they tried to push through. How can they get around the patch before the world ends?

Pertisia has a way, but she wants to explain how she has it first. So, with a firming breath, she asks Ima to remove the cosmetic spell she had zir put in place.

She doesn’t have a left eye. Most of that side of her face is clawed up, with three thick, red scars running straight down over her eye. That’s why her character portrait looked weird. It was a quirk of the illusion.

She explains that she and Saf used to be best friends, before Safina befriended Nel and Rook. They got into trouble together all the time. One day, Safina’s wand was stolen by the Snatcher. A witch is weakened without their wand. They couldn’t get in there to reach it, not with normal magic. Pertisia, wanting to help and impress Safina, used her family’s old tomes to research forbidden magic.

She created the spell to dig into the Unseen. Safina was the one to cast it, but the research was all Perty. It went perfectly, at first. They popped in, took the wand back, and left. On the way out, however, they were attacked by the Unseen creature. They barely escaped, but Pertisia didn’t get away unscathed. Her family was furious with her for using blood magic and tarnishing their name. After being healed, she was pulled from the school for a year, and when she got back, Safina was hanging out with Nel and Rook and stayed away from her.

Pertisia was furious. Not only had she seemingly been abandoned by the person she almost died helping, but now Saf was risking more so-called ‘friends’ with her antics, as if she had no sense of guilt. In reality, Safina felt too much guilt to face Pertisia again, but her need to keep secrets caused the rift between them we saw at the start of the game.

That’s why she hates Safina. She thinks she’s endangering people recklessly for her own gain.

That’s why she pushed everyone away, especially Maritte. Part of her was afraid of being betrayed again.

That’s why Maritte’s act of kindness helped her so much. It was just like the first time she went through the Unseen, but Maritte proved that she was willing to both risk herself for Pertisia’s safety and own up to her actions. It lets Perty put her faith in someone again.

For Maritte, who helped her begin the healing process, and to save the world, she opens one last rift into the Unseen. There, everyone stands with her against the monster that caused her so much grief. No more running from her past. No more letting her trauma control her. No more hiding in shame from what she did. She faces that beast, and she buries it at long last.

Can you see why I love her story so much? On top of being brilliantly told, it handles the topic of PTSD with the due diligence it deserves. She’s forgiven for what her trauma made her do. She’s given the room to breathe she needs to come to terms with it. She’s given a shoulder to lean on as soon as she admits to needing it. It shows that she’s willing to put in the effort it takes to overcome her trauma. It’s not easy. Change never is. But it’s worth it. Having friends who understand her certainly helps.

As an extra little bit of praise, I love how her scars are handled. How many games let their main characters look genuinely torn up? Scars on female characters’ faces tend to be small and unintrusive, not massive and debilitating. There’s a need to keep them looking pretty for the camera, which implies that you can’t look good with scars that you had no say in getting.

“Ikenfell” says with absolute certainty that, no, you _can_ still be beautiful no matter your scars. Inside and out.

Yes. I’m crying right now. There’s no shame in admitting it. This game is just _so freaking beautiful_. I haven’t felt this warm and fuzzy since the first time I laid eyes on “Undertale.” How hasn’t the gay witch game taken over the internet? Someone get Jack on the case, now!

Okay. Okay. I’m good. Back on topic, yeah? I think we can meet up with the folks who didn’t want spoiled on Pertisia’s character arc. They’re in for a real treat.

-

Every member of your party, and most of the important side characters, has something about themselves that they’re not happy with. By the end of the game, they’ve all accepted that they have something to work on. It’s a healthy mindset to have, to love yourself without ignoring that you can be better.

There’s an optional boss you can fight in the endgame that’s a cloned army of your party. Each one opens the fight by saying what they hate about themselves. This boss fight, the Specters, kicked my ass! All six teammates are cloned, but you only get three people to work with. Plus you need to kill all six of them within a few turns of each other or they come back to life. It’s tough!

Just like facing yourself. Your issues won’t just go away after bopping them down once or twice. They’ll keep coming. But even so, keep going. Don’t stop. They’re strong, but you’re stronger. I promise you that.

When you finally win, they each continue their opening line. This time, however, it’s a sweet note of triumph. They’re saying that they can move on, even knowing that they have a long way to go. The fight to get to a better place is a long and arduous one, but every inch of bloody ground you cross is worth it. Love yourself, my friends. You’re not alone.

To end on a more upbeat note, there’s one more great thing that the game espouses that everyone needs to hear. Something that certain mainstream LGBT rep shows fail to acknowledge, or that is thrown aside for a more toxic shadow. Not every relationship is worth your time and energy. That goes for lovers, for family, anybody. Knowing what a _good_ relationship looks like is absolutely vital.

The game draws a clear line between what is and isn’t acceptable in its cast. Pushing people away and being bitter because you were hurt? It’s okay. It’s not your fault. Being the one who hurt them because you can’t stop lying to save your own ego? Not cool. You have to earn that trust back.

That latter case is Maritte telling Safina off for all the bullshit she put people through. If not for Saf’s lies pushing everyone away from her, she might have been better prepared to stop the world-ending disaster long before Maritte had to get involved. Safina hurt a lot of people, and she’s going to have to earn their trust.

Knowing when to put your foot down and say when something is unacceptable is a valuable skill. This is especially true for the LGBT community. Do I need to reiterate what kinds of homes some of us came from? It’s okay to cut people out if they refuse to acknowledge how much they’ve hurt you. Any show that tries to tell you to forgive those bastards because “they’re your _FaMiLy_ ” can eat my left foot. I know some people are in a situation where they don’t have a choice, but the moment you find your out, you take it and never look back. If someone’s only aim in being near you is to hurt you, then you don’t need them.

There’s even a few mundane examples of good relationships here that I personally loved. After the end of your adventure, you jump ahead a few months and catch up with where everyone landed when the dust settled, and they’re all doing great. Maritte and Gilda tried being a couple for a while, but they realized that they’re not a good fit for each other that way. They still part on friendly terms, though, maintaining a good platonic relationship even though they’re not right for a romantic one.

You know who Maritte gets with as the end credits roll? Pertisia. For anyone who read that chunk up above, you know exactly why that’s the softest thing. Everyone else, you’re gonna have to play the game now and find out.

One last bit of advice before we wrap this up. If you want to write a really gay cast but don’t want to deal with the heavier subject matters that it might entail, then it’s fine to not bring up the heavy stuff. We need some good, honest discussions about serious topics, certainly, but a lot of us just really want to see more of ourselves in the stories we love. I, for one, was over the moon to see Petronella repping my aro amigos, even though its relevance to the actual plot is negligible. Just being seen and respected is a valuable step in the right direction.

This all ended up being a bit more serious than you might have thought, right? I hit on some dark subjects, and I hope like Hell I did them justice. Some things just really need to be said. I’ll try to find something more fun to discuss next time. Hmm… Who wants to see me to bonk “Mary Sue” with a cardboard tube?


	4. Mary Sue is Useless - Persona

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Who wants to go bugbear hunting with a mini nuke?

We’ve all heard the term “Mary Sue” before, right? If you haven’t, it’s a label placed on characters who are powerful enough to bulldoze through any problem they encounter while being lauded by absolutely everyone in-universe for it, and often the author by association. This can apply to social situations as well as fights; the outcome is roughly the same. There’s a big bad threatening to genocide the planet? Sue will dust him in half a chapter, then spend the other half quipping about how easy it was. Or maybe they’re a pacifist Sue, so they talk down the genocidal madman, derailing that character’s motivations with a few pretty words and turning the evil overlord into a staunch ally. Never forget that a Sue is constantly praised by everyone they encounter, except for the villains who are obviously evil. After all, they don’t like the hero! That’s crime enough in the Sue-verse.

The problem with a Mary Sue is simple in concept. If a character faces no serious resistance, the story they’re in loses all tension. The threat of failure is what makes success so sweet. That’s the commonly held theory, and it rings true for most situations. If you follow the through line here, you would come to the conclusion that Mary Sues are bad, and that no story should have overpowered characters. That’s a simple, easy rule of thumb.

What did I say about generalizations? That’s right! Don’t trust them. What sounds simple on paper only achieves that simplicity by hacking off valuable nuance. As a matter of fact, “Mary Sue” is the crown gem of my problem with oversimplified critique.

What’s my beef with the term? It only hits the very surface of a problem. A character is not a standalone entity within a story. They are the result of many factors overlapping, weaving together, and eventually landing in a seemingly standalone state on the screen. The actual problem at hand may not be that character, but one of the elements which leads into them. A critique of just the character does very little to diagnose the actual problem at hand, if there even is one.

To illustrate what I mean about character composition and how it affects the perception of their strength within a story, I’m reaching deep into my bag of tricks and pulling out the series I’m most familiar with. My favorite franchise of all. I am, of course, talking about the “Persona” games. The thing that makes “Persona” so perfect for my purposes here is the way they construct their player characters, the Wild Cards who you inhabit throughout “Persona 3,” “Persona 4,” and “Persona 5.” When you look at their function within their individual plots, all three of them fill the exact same role.

They are your stand-in, acting as your camera into the events of the games. They all lead a team of teenagers to fight against monsters in a strange other world connected to our own, but none of them actually make decisions that steer the wider narrative until the very end of the game. This choice hinges on the player’s understanding of the game’s themes, only delivering you to the true ending if you make your choice based on what the story has been trying to teach you. At the very end, your character delivers the climactic final strike against the big bad god of the hour, fueled by the power of friendship and Jungian philosophy. The day is saved, all thanks to Protagonist-kun and company!

This is the mold that all three protagonists follow, but even a cursory glance into the fandom will show you that these similar in function player characters are perceived very differently from each other. How can that be? Setting aside dialogue options that do little besides add flavor to certain scenes, it’s because of the way the world around these characters reacts to their presence.

I’m going to assume, given what most people come to my corner of the Archive for, that the vast majority of you reading this already know Persona decently well. I probably don’t have to explain their basic plots, or all the tomfoolery around the names of the main characters and how people can’t seem to agree on a singular name for any of the three. I’m just going to hone in on the important bits for the sake of my arguments using the names I’m most familiar with. Okay? Cool. Let’s start with “Persona 3.”

Most people see Minato Arisato as the most grounded of the Wild Cards. For starters, where both of the others are the undisputed heads of their teams, Minato is only the _field_ leader. The actual operation of SEES as a group is left to Mitsuru and Ikutsuki. Minato’s sole responsibility is fighting Shadows when they pop up and making sure his team is strong enough when the big boys come knocking. It’s a comparatively modest position.

This is reaffirmed by how the other members of SEES interact with him, especially towards the beginning of the game when they haven’t bonded much yet. Yukari sees him as a bit of an idiot who she’ll chew out when he does something she thinks is dumb or disrespectful, at least by her judgment. Junpei is, per his own words, a dick. He hypes himself up to no end, so when Minato gets the management position he thinks he deserves, he turns abrasive, even though he’s a pretty chill guy to hang with when that particular topic isn’t on the table.

As an aside, just about everything I’ve said for Minato also goes for Minako, his female counterpart if you choose to play as a girl in the Portable edition of the game, but Junpei’s jealousy seems to be inflamed by her more than Minato. You know, because he’s a bit of a sexist dick at the start. He thinks the only dude in the team should be leading, etc, etc.

This early tension in SEES mellows out some as the game progresses, reflecting the development of a friendship between Minato and his peers. Later members aren’t nearly so at-his-throat. Not even Shinjiro, whose whole thing is being a purposefully abrasive thug to everyone except the dog. Minato has to work up his friendships from square one, but once the ball gets going, he’s accepted as a core member of the group. It’s a realistic arc, which proponents of “Persona 3” praise over how much later entries suck up to the player.

I find this a little funny, because Minato gets more than a little sucking up himself. Aigis literally greets him the first time by saying that she needs to stay at his side. You know, Aigis, the badass combat robot who is also a very pretty girl. Sure, it’s revealed later on that this is a subconscious pull towards Thanatos, who she sealed in him ten years prior to the game, but that does little to tamper down the cute girl orbiting him like he’s the center of the solar system, especially since she goes right back to it, if in a more subdued fashion, after Death peaces out to his own body.

Sticking with the girls, he’s also the only Wild Card who gets zero repercussions for dating around in any incarnation of his game. Sure, the original release hit you for cheating if you progressed certain female Social Links concurrently, but it was still possible from there to build a full harem, including with the girl you supposedly scorned. You literally cannot hold a platonic relationship with any of the female Social Links, barring Maiko only because she’s a little kid.

And the cherry on top? Minato goes on to become one of the most powerful beings in the entire Persona universe. When he sacrifices himself to seal Nyx, he is displaying enough power to imprison an urge set forth by the whole of humanity. Arguably, the desire to die that Erebus embodies, which Minato has locked up, is the most powerful subconscious creature lurking in the other world, and our boy has that sucker chained and gagged without a hint of wavering in the games occurring up to a decade later. The single being that’s stronger than him might be Nyx herself, the only non-cognitive deity you encounter. Minato is the pinnacle of humanity, the Messiah. Yet, he’s the grounded player character?

That’s how he’s perceived, because the game doesn’t hype up his wish fulfillment too much in most of these cases. You don’t get much extra content from the Social Links you max out, so the fact that he’s doinked half the neighborhood slides into the background. Aigis is, as said before, revealed to only fixate on him for a tertiary reason, and by the time she goes back to it, she’s developed enough of a relationship with him to make it a more natural fit. He practically achieves godhood, but only at the very end of the game, and at the cost of his life. The sacrifice justifies his power. He’s done something worth respecting, which his team absolutely holds up every time they’re shown after the events of “Persona 3.”

The tale of Minato Arisato that most players are shown is of an emotionally dulled guy growing into a rough, but ultimately true group of friends and going on to give up his life to protect them. He earns every inch of ground he gets. He’s not the center of Tatsumi Port Island right off the bat.

Unlike Yu Narukami, hailing from “Persona 4.” Yes, the Chad of the series himself. His game is often derided as a ‘Scooby-Doo mystery,’ and while I think that’s a gross oversimplification and misses a lot of valuable depth, Yu doesn’t do much to dissuade the argument.

Let’s tally up how everyone sees him within a month of meeting him. Yosuke calls him his partner since the two of them are the initial spearhead in solving the murder case. Teddie calls him “Sensei” after seeing his prowess with the Persona ability, an honor which he doesn’t extend to anyone else who goes on to get a Persona. His cousin Nanako accepts him as a big brother surrogate. And the biggest one, Rise Kujikawa, a nationally loved idol who every guy knows and wants, glomps onto him with a crush that could only be more obvious if she printed, “I love Yu <3,” on a t-shirt.

There’s no mistaking it. Where Minato had to work past an initial cold shoulder and continued having to manage the pricklier edges of SEES, Yu is almost instantly the keystone of his Investigation Team.

To carry a few steps further, he’s one of the only people whose initial Persona is an actual god, Izanagi, something usually reserved for a Persona’s final form after facing enough hardship. Hell, his canonical family name, “Narukami,” can be translated directly as, “Howling God.” It’s right in his name! And a recurring nickname for him in the spinoff titles is “Kingpin.” You can’t go three steps without something trying to suck his massive, throbbing ego, it seems. Ah, and let’s not forget that he’s noted to be one of the first protagonists in any Shin Megami Tensei game to get an uncontested happy ending. That’s a big one! What Yu wants, Yu seemingly gets without much hassle. This all must mean that he’s one of the most overpowered Sues in the entire Persona series, right?

Well… No. Far from it, actually. If you look at what he accomplishes in the grand scheme of things, he’s actually the least impressive Wild Card. Minato ended his game by ascending into divinity as the Universe. He fought on past death itself, both figuratively and literally, to save the planet from being obliterated completely by Nyx. Jumping ahead a bit, the next guy we’ll be discussing formed a crime ring that spanned most of Tokyo and garnered enough sway to depose a prime minister-elect, among other feats. What did Yu do? He solved a couple of murders, prevented people from devolving into Shadows, and then punched the god who did it in the face to ensure that she would never try it again. It’s all cool stuff, but next to his direct peers, Yu doesn’t stand out as much.

It kind of fits the setting, though. Inaba is stated to be a dying backwater. We’re shown that they have a police force that’s so lazy, they would take any chance to sweep the murders under the rug if they could. Gangs pop up in, like, three Social Links to raise havoc. Very few people come into Inaba for more than a day trip to the Amagi Inn. Someone decently impressive, like Yu, sliding in is a big deal.

Most of the people I just mentioned as respecting him to an almost cartoonish degree have a darn good reason to, as well. He saved all of their lives. He single-handedly saved Yosuke from his Shadow and picked him up afterwards. Of course Yosuke would respect the Hell out of him. Same goes for Teddie, who suddenly found himself with someone who could stand up to the monsters he’s been running from for as long as he can remember. While he doesn’t save Nanako in the same sense until much later on, he does save her in a way by helping to piece her broken family back together after Dojima let it decay. The girl is scared and lonely and only finds someone willing to engage with her about it in Yu. While how much Rise falls for him is still a bit much, he did save her life, too, and he probably made quite an impression on her by fighting two horrible demons in a row to save everyone present at the end of her dungeon. It’s not baseless affection. At the very least, she’s no more glaring than Aigis was with Minato.

Yu earns everything he has, just like Minato before him. The difference is in how the game portrays it. “Persona 4” lavishes Yu for his accomplishments in a way that “Persona 3,” with its darker tones and grim consequences, didn’t. What makes people see Yu as a potential Sue is not how powerful he is. It’s how the story treats him for what power he does have. That’s a very important distinction to make.

I can even further emphasize it with our next contestant, the ever-lovable crime boy Akira Kurusu from “Persona 5.” In many ways, Akira is as much of a heartthrob as Yu. Ryuji, a standoffish punk, instantly takes him on as his best bro. Ann, the prettiest girl in school, all but cries in his arms when she can’t take the abuse thrown at her by Kamoshida anymore. Futaba, an extreme agoraphobe, uses him as a human shield even before she warms up to anyone else, setting her up as either a clingy little sister or a very clingy girlfriend, depending on your choices. And, lest we forget a whole lot of controversy, Akira can also shack up with his homeroom teacher, who he hires as a maid. That’s, like, three fetishes at once.

Then there’s his professional career! Where Minato and Yu largely went unknown by the wider populace, Akira and his Phantom Thieves are infamous on a global scale. No one knows their true identities, but everyone feels the blast when they start putting corrupt bastards behind bars one after another. It gets to the point that their work intersects with and derails an entire branch of the Yakuza. That means the Phantom Thieves are officially among the most dangerous criminal empires in all of Japan, and that’s without considering how Futaba alone is their universe’s equivalent of Anonymous. Need I remind you who she has taken as her ‘Key Item’? Joker cuts a more imposing figure than any other protagonist in all of Persona.

What makes Akira’s case different from Yu’s, however, is that all this good stuff is directly juxtaposed against how shit he’s treated by everyone else in Tokyo. The game starts with him fresh out of jail from a false assault conviction laid on him by a corrupt asshole. His life is effectively over before it began because Shido wanted to get to non-consensual third base. Now, even a whiff of trouble will put him right back behind bars with zero hope of recovery.

And trouble seems to find him wherever he goes. As soon as he hits Shujin Academy, his record is leaked because of Kamoshida’s egotistical string pulling, leaving Akira as a social pariah. You can’t go ten steps in that building without someone whispering about how much they hate and/or fear him. Even though he’s rather milquetoast before the main plot kicks off, everyone sees him as an even more dangerous person than Kanji Tatsumi, someone who went out of his way to make people hate him. This is all for something that Akira never actually did. The phrase, “Up shit creek without a paddle,” was invented for Akira Kurusu.

The long, terrible path of Akira’s life is a downwards plummet that suddenly swings into the most painful uppercut ever when he awakens to Persona. Him taking on the mantel of Joker and leading the Phantom Thieves against corruption is effectively revenge against the system that sought to sweep him under the rug. Every good thing that Akira squeezes from the stone is an act of defiance against the evils of his world. Giving Akira all this power becomes a cathartic experience for the player, almost like the famous action movies of the 80s and 90s got blended with a heist thriller and a sheet of acid.

Across the three modern Persona games, you have an average guy who claws his way to divinity, an all-beloved Chad, and an underdog on the warpath, and the difference between them is largely defined by outside factors, not their own power. If you were to look at this basic list of characteristics and call Yu a Mary Sue, it would be ignoring how he’s actually the least powerful of the three, how his social life within his friend group is roughly equal to Akira’s, and how the thing that makes him seem so overpowered is not himself but the people around him. A good, usable analysis of these games requires more than the buzzword.

Now, for a spot of fun and to explore a few other ways that incredibly powerful, borderline Sue characters can still uphold an interesting plot despite what popular rhetoric would have you believe, I’m going to do something that’s maybe a little prideful. I’m going to dissect my own reimaginings of these characters as they appear in “The Many Quirks” series! (Side note, it feels weird to see that title put in semi-formal quotation marks.)

We’ll start with P5 and work backwards from there, since that’s the order I wrote these stories in for some reason. Everyone who knows my work knows I’ve always loved making my protagonists ludicrously overpowered. Akira is an exemplar of this trend. Well, him and the entirety of his team to be precise.

Within the canon of P5, the cognition of humanity can shape the physical world when applied correctly. Yaldabaoth uses this malleable state of being to shape the real world into the image of Mementos when he tries to take it over in the game’s climax. Moreover, both P3 and P4 have examples of magic cropping up outside of cognitive spaces in the hands of powerful enough beings, such as the Velvet Room attendants or Marie. There’s precedence for real world magic here.

I saw this evidence and said to myself, “Hey, you know what would be cool? Ann using her immunity to fire to cook hot dogs on a volcano during the Hawaii trip.” So that’s exactly what I did. I introduced the idea that as the Phantom Thieves further cemented their view of themselves as wizard badasses in the other world, those qualities would become further entrenched in their core selves, thereby slowly blossoming in the real world.

I should stress that it was a relatively slow process, for some more than others. Yusuke, being a highly imaginative fellow, was the first to push the boundary and discover it all on his own, when he was the only person in the room. This means he only had to contend with his own cognition to make it happen, if that makes any sense. Furthermore, he only managed to create a thin layer of ice on his fingers, not a full blast of it like he could in battle. I didn’t just drop the keys to apocalypse in their laps all at once. I tied it into a part of their character development. You have to balance the Rule of Cool with some substance.

For Akira, I hinted that he was developing his real world powers the slowest out of everyone. While Ann cooked her hot dogs and Futaba learned how to probe forbidden knowledge like a psychic encyclopedia, he could barely start a fingertip flame. He is seen to be the baddest of asses when operating as Joker in the Metaverse, so what’s holding him back?

Joker. That’s what held him back.

Let me paint you a story. You are a bastard in Japan, one of the most judgmental cultures towards people like yourself and your mother. Your mom was promised the world by a charismatic suitor, but he ran off as soon as she started to show her pregnancy, leaving you high and dry, stuck in poverty in a backwater dump rife with crime.

You live every day scraping by, barely finding enough to eat. Sometimes, you don’t eat at all. You can’t afford to go to school. Instead, you work the streets as a menial laborer. You get paid pocket change to break your back insulating roofs, painting fences, or whatever a potential ‘client’ would ask of you. Sometimes, people say they’ll pay you, but then cheat you out of what you’re owed. You can’t do anything to make them cough it up. You’re only a child, not even a preteen yet. So all you can do is carry on, cutting yourself to the bone, relying on the kindness of a strange man who likes bear puns to not starve to death, or worse. All because of the circumstances of your birth. It’s not fair.

Then… It all catches up to your poor, suffering mother. She tries to take the quick way out. It’s a stroke of luck that you arrive home in time to pry her rope from the ceiling. Luckier still, you’re able to get her medical attention, and she makes a full recovery. She sees how downright terrified you were in that moment, and she resolves to do better. For you. For herself.

But you’re not just scared. No. You’re _furious_. Why did she have to be driven so low as to think death was an escape? How could someone take advantage of such a kind, loving person, only to leave them in the ditch? Why is it that you _just existing_ was justification enough for her so-called family to leave her in such a horrible place? There’s no _justice_ in any of it! You don’t understand. Maybe there’s nothing to be understood.

Somehow, your little family moves on from there. Your mom, maybe from the help of a kind benefactor, found employment somewhere not so rotten as your old hometown. She starts earning enough to make a living. She asks you… No, _tells_ you, not to worry about the money anymore. She doesn’t want you to spend your life just scraping by. She wants you to get a real education so you can move up in the world. She wants to give you a life worth living.

You don’t waste that chance. Far from it. You hit the books harder than anyone else. All that grit you earned on the streets gets put to good use, devouring as much knowledge as you can get your grubby hands on. You don’t just want to make a living. You want to make enough to pay your mom back for the work she’s putting in while you study. You want to, fortune willing, climb high enough up the ladder so you can change things. You remember the pain of your childhood. You don’t want anyone else to have to grow up like that. You want the world to be a better place.

Then you have one bad encounter with _him_. A drunk asshole who gets you arrested, who ruins your shot at the life you dreamed of, just so he could get his dick wet. You climbed up from rock bottom, from the very depths of Hell, left your blood on its stones, only to get kicked right back down to its deepest pit.

Now. I want you to look me in the eye and tell me how someone, _anyone_ , could remain a kind, giving person after that.

Akira doesn’t know. All he understands is that when he found the power of Persona, it nearly turned him into the exact kind of monster he so despised in his youth. His first thought upon seeing Kamoshida’s Shadow locked in a cell was to kill him. Execute him as mercilessly as he almost killed Akira. If he hadn’t heard Ryuji nearly getting caught by the Shadows, if he hadn’t chosen to cut off his plans to go and save that stupid, reckless, kindhearted doofus, he would have been a murderer.

He decides after that to build a wall between Akira Kurusu and Joker. Akira is an angry, scared little kid who would use the power of Persona to cut a bloody swathe through the world he hates. Joker is a hero who can save those who are suffering from turning into people like Akira. That’s what he believes. That’s why, at first, he can’t bring himself to use magic in the real world. It would erode the barrier he built to protect everyone from himself.

This is the purpose of his immense power in “Phantom Thievery.” Giving him the strength to enforce his will imposes on him the question of how he will use it. That he chooses not to seek pure revenge is a testament to the kind of strength that really matters. Him learning to accept himself with the help of his friends allows him to reach his full potential as their leader and as a human being.

Reflections like this are present in just about every case of any character achieving greater strength in my Persona stories. I haven’t even touched on the Twilight Cowl, a Super Saiyan-esque transformation with causal roots in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. I hold up the moment Makoto achieves that transformation in “Girlfriend Thievery” as one of the best scenes I’ve written. But, we’re straying from the loose guidelines I’ve set to keep myself from rambling eternally. Maybe we can get back to my changes to the Persona magic system in another chapter, if anyone is interested.

Now, with good old Yu Narukami, I went in a slightly different direction. That is to say, I did a complete 180.

Yu begins his story at the top of the mountain. You think his canon incarnation was a Chad? I doubled down on that shit. He practically introduces himself with a wad of cash. Just, a random gift for Yosuke after he laments missing out on a golden hand Shadow’s payout, which he needed to buy a motorcycle. Yu is loaded in “Investigation Teamery.”

In fact, as I later reveal through Naoto, Yu is the sole heir to the Narukami investment family’s fortune, which encapsulates a share in the vast majority of all business in Japan, as well as a lion’s share of the global market. Yu may very well be the single richest person in the country. He doesn’t tell anyone about it himself, though. Rise goes behind his back to learn this information from Naoto, who has maintained a clear wariness of Yu up to this point. Odd.

Back to Yu, he’s not just an idle rich person. He is stated to be an absolute machine by his sports teams. Yes, teams plural. He broke the rules set forth in the game and joined both soccer and basketball. As well as both music and theater. And he’s an ace at all four of them, on top of leading his team against the Shadows and maintaining his Social Links.

He also fences, which he taught to Kanji. He mentioned that he considered teaching Kanji how to joust, but he figured fencing was more feasible to set up.

His total perfection is so blatant to everyone in Inaba that when people notice him and Rise getting real cozy with each other, they all pretty much say, “Yeah, that seems about right.” Well, barring those guys who want a shot at Rise, and those girls who want a piece of Yu. And vice-versa.

Where Akira began life in the gutter, Yu sat on top of the world in a throne of gold and velvet. I said I try to maintain substance with my overpowered characters, so, what kind of content could possibly balance the Merriest of Sues?

Simple. It’s all a sham. Kind of.

Everything stated above is completely true. He really is that rich. He really is that strong. He really is the perfect specimen of a human, on the outside. There is, however, one glaring question that needs to be asked; how and why did he get to be so perfect?

The Narukami family is little known to the layman, but within the upper echelons of society, everyone knows them to be the most conniving, ruthless, dangerous individuals you could ever have the misfortune of crossing paths with. When Yu meets a TV executive who was attempting to abuse the Amagi Inn to bolster his own ratings, as is shown in Yukiko’s canon Social Link, Yu drove him off with a half-veiled threat and little else. The mere implication that he was about to cross Yu was enough to send him running with his tail between his legs.

Before his retreat, the executive lets loose one retaliatory piece of information to Chie and Yukiko, who were watching at the time. Apparently, Yu is so infamous as to have his own nickname: the Wolf of Tokyo. Yu is less than pleased to have this information brandied about so openly, but when they ask him about it, he waves the nickname off as his peers’ taste in American movies. He also covers his cold, severe demeanor towards the man as a mask, since letting people know how you really feel in business is a surefire way to be taken advantage of.

This is enough to ease Chie and Yukiko’s curiosity, but it paints Yu in a particularly ominous shade. His behavior isn’t simply cold and calculating. Many stings he used to drive his points home bordered on sadistic. He all but threatened to throw his weight behind any legal complications that would arise in favor of the Amagi Inn. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say, based on his clear disdain for the executive, that he would enjoy doing so immensely.

Yu grew up in an environment that made him feel as though he was perfect. He’s but a teenager, and yet bigwigs grovel and kiss his feet like he’s a king. Naoto, heir to the Shirogane family’s fame, is wary of him the moment she realizes he’s involved in the murder case, even though he’s saving victims. The full extent of the power he wields is unclear as of yet, but a few glances behind the curtain say that he’s willing to use it indiscriminately towards the ends he deems favorable.

But then, if he truly believes that he’s so perfect a being… Why would he hide further details from Chie and Yukiko? Why is Naoto the only one who knows anything about this until she forms a pact with Rise? He’s their leader and a very close friend. If anything, knowing how influential he is would theoretically cement his reputation in their eyes, and those of Inaba at large. Why would he hide the Wolf of Tokyo?

If you walk back a few paragraphs, I said that the Narukami family is “conniving, ruthless, and dangerous.” Those words have an evil ring to them, yeah?

The one flashback shown of Yu’s family depicts his mother as matching the connotation to a T. Knowing that she has raised Yu as a most excellent hand of the family, she uses him towards the end of enriching the family name, to her son’s developmental detriment. He doesn’t get a life of his own. She thinks an afternoon fishing every few months is enough to satiate him. Then, it’s back in his cage to sign more paperwork, facilitate more lucrative deals, and carry out whatever bidding she so pleases.

Yu came from a place of power, but with that power came corruption and an all-consuming egotism. This is the environment that created Yu. It shows in how he interacts with anyone he feels is beneath him, like that TV executive. As his mother commanded him, so does he command his lessers. In acting with his power, he is revealed to be a tyrant in every meaning of the word.

He realizes this now. And he _hates_ it.

The kindhearted Yu that Inaba sees isn’t just an act to hide what he’s really like. It’s the sort of person he _wants_ to be. He wants his friends to love him, not fear him. He wants them to know Yu, the stalwart leader, academic ace, philanthropic playboy, and all-around pleasant guy. Under no circumstances does he want them to know the Wolf of Tokyo, the blood-thirsty sociopath from which he came.

Where power set Akira free by showing the strength of his heart, it instead reveals the weakness in Yu’s and chains him down.

He can’t escape that figment of what once was. He knows his upbringing instilled in him a hunger for domination, but simply understanding that such a thing is ‘wrong’ isn’t enough to excise the rot. The self can’t be changed so quickly or easily. He wants to be a better person, with every fiber of his being, but he carries with him shades of who he used to be. On some level, who he still is. He’s scarred by the Narukami he was raised to be.

As was the world. Eventually, when Naoto joins the team properly, Yu opens up to her in an effort to prove that he genuinely wants to be on better terms with her going forward. He tells her much of the above, albeit with a lot less of the specifics. He tells her that he wants to be a good person now, but that he’s wracked by guilt over… something. Something he did when he was fully enveloped in the vindictive Narukami identity. He would tell her what he did, but he’s afraid that doing so would make her unable to work with him and solve the current crisis. He doesn’t want to put himself and his desires ahead of the killer at large.

Yu has always been powerful, but he wasn’t always good. This, again, stands in sharp contrast to Akira, who gained his power during the events of “Phantom Thievery.” Akira, acting in anger, almost became a monster like Akechi. What do you suppose Yu could have done with his power before he gained the conscience to use it well?

This is, unfortunately, as far as I’m able to speak on the topic for now. “Investigation Teamery” isn’t complete at time of writing, and I would rather keep the specifics of Yu’s crimes veiled. Now that I’m writing the events of November, I think the pressure is finally mounting enough for me to put the squeeze on Yu. His complicated history with power and morality is about to come to a head.

Even so, what I have shown is enough to substantiate my arguments here. Yu is an incredibly powerful person. Unreasonably so, you could say. And yet, the emotional and moral baggage that comes with his strength has given substance to an entire turbulent arc. Rather than neutering intrigue and suspense as with the cookie-cutter Mary Sue, he has become the instrument of tension. And I am playing him like a pair of bongos!

I haven’t started writing my own “Persona 3” story at this time, but, looking over my plans for it, I can tell you that Minato’s relationship with power will be every bit as uncertain as his predecessors. Uh… descendants? I have no idea which direction is right in this context. Why am I writing these stories backwards? Heck.

“Mary Sue” is reflective of a grossly simplified view on power’s role in a story. It presumes that a physical struggle must be present and pressing in order for a story to derive any tension. This is a false base. A physical struggle isn’t the only point of intrigue within a story. I’d go so far as to say that it isn’t even the best possible source.

Much more interesting is the emotional struggle. Not everyone will live a life of adventure and combat. In fact, very few in the modern world will. Our troubles are more social and personal than that. None of us, or maybe just very few of us, will have to muster up the might to shoot metal god in the face as Akira did. His conflicts with poverty and the desire to make the world a better place despite his financial and emotional shortcomings are a whole lot closer to home.

I doubt anyone reading this was born to the richest family on Earth as Yu was. And yet, all of us know the sting of guilt, of things we hope to keep buried.

None of us are the Messiah. But all of us have been faced with loss and the desire to hide from it by drowning ourselves with indulgence when we can’t stay numb.

Power is not a universal constant. The strong and weak alike are tethered by the frailty of the heart.

That was a long one, wasn’t it? I didn’t intend on it going on for nearly seven thousand words, but then, covering all these divergent character arcs should have tipped me off. In any case, I think I said what needed to be said. An overpowered character breaking the plot is indicative of a plot that wasn’t designed to accommodate said character. They are not in and of themselves a sign of a bad plot. Breaking the knees of critical shortcuts is practically the key theme of this entire essay bundle.

I think I’ll keep going on the Persona train, at least for one more chapter. It’s the series I know best, so more than a bit of what I’ve learned came from it. Plus it’s on my brain right now with P5 Strikers coming down the pipe.

In celebration of the spinoff, I’m going to cover another spinoff. My favorite among them, in fact. A lot of people deride Persona Q’s writing. Some of them even have a valid point. I’m looking at you, Teddie!


	5. Flanderization, Bears, and Protein - Persona Q

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Protein.  
> Steak.  
> Protein.  
> Roast.  
> Protein.  
> Meat Jelly.  
> Someone shoot me.

I like soft games every now and then. You knew that from chapter one of this thing, where I praised the light and fluffy “Tokyo Mirage Sessions” to high heaven and bagged on its halfhearted waves towards a more grim plot line. Serious stories and moody tones are all well and good, but sometimes, you just want to goof off with lovable characters for a few hours.

That’s the tagline for the “Persona Q” spinoff games. They are, mostly, focused on fun interactions between the casts from the mainline games. And you know what? I love them. The Persona games are all about getting to know your party members and using their personal issues to expand on wider themes. Being friends with them is practically the core gameplay mechanic here. There’s merit in just having a good time with them.

When you look at the wider reception around the PQ games, though, you start seeing a trend of people trying to set fire to the whole thing. A lot of the complaints are total garbage. “They’re not serious, so they’re bad.” “It’s a different gameplay style, so they’re bad.” “The inability to share experience conveniently in the first game renders its massive cast of characters unwieldy, preventing the player from spending time with _all_ of the cast and pushing them to focus on a handful of them instead, which runs against a certain vital quest for powering everyone up towards the endgame if you didn’t know about it beforehand.” Oh, wait, that last one is actually valid… Whoops!

There’s one argument I really want to focus on here. It might be the most common one, and it intersects with the first argument from above there. A lot of players think that the characters aren’t written well. They say they focus too much on singular, easily recognizable gags that were small parts of their canon characters and run them into the ground. The characters we all loved have been, per the common vocabulary of online critique, “flanderized.”

I find myself treading familiar ground here. I actually agree with the main thrust of that argument. However, just dropping the buzzword, “flanderization,” doesn’t actually dig deep enough into the problem. There are layers at play that caused the gross exaggeration we see in PQ. Why are certain members of the P3 and P4 cast stripped back like this? Can the root problem be remedied? Why do I still love these games despite seeing this glaring flaw?

An easy fruit to grab at is to claim that the writers were phoning it in. It’s a spinoff series on a set of consoles that the target audience might not even own because the mainline Persona games were, at the time, Sony platform exclusives, not Nintendo. Why would they bother to spend more than bare minimum effort? Just slap together pantomimes of the old characters, recycle some gags, and call it a day.

The problem here is that the above answer is bloody blind! Just looking at historical precedence, Persona is one of the very few series that makes all of its spinoff games canon. The Arena games? Official continuations of both P3 and P4’s plots through the casts’ ongoing growth. P4 Dancing advances the themes of the original game. P3 and P5 Dancing, though forgotten later due to being dreams, expand on background details that still line up with canon. The upcoming P5 Strikers is Persona 5-2 in all but name. The Persona writers never skimp. Laziness is not to blame.

When you look specifically at PQ, you also see that certain moments in it shine with perfect understanding of what made us love these characters in the first place, as well as the themes they were set against. The best highlight of this is just about everything in the third dungeon. It’s right around where the more sinister undercurrents of the plot start to surface, making it the perfect time to pull back the curtain on the less pleasant aspects of our cast.

The boss at the end of the dungeon is the Kind Doctor. This name is cruelly sarcastic. Its introduction shows it and a gaggle of mangled nurse dolls tearing another Shadow to shreds with oversized calipers. The things it says are so sing-song innocent, like a serial killer humming to himself as he stabs a victim to death. It’s deeply unsettling, especially when you realize later what it represents. You’re all but guaranteed to hate this thing.

But no matter how much you hate it, Mitsuru hates it more. The cutscene introducing the Doctor zooms in on her reaction to it. Even with the cutesy chibi artstyle, the hollow, shellshocked look in her eyes is haunting. She backs away slowly and trips over Chie, who huddled and cowered by the door, drawing the Doctor’s attention. It calls out to the party in that horribly sunny voice.

And Mitsuru _loses it_. She’s the most composed, mature person in the whole group. She’s just seen an entire dungeon of horror movie creatures come to life. But this doctor performing some twisted surgery on a Shadow is the thing that finally makes her shatter as she screams for it to, “Stay away!”

Anyone who played “Persona 3” knows exactly why she’s so afraid. In that game, her family’s company performed cruel human experiments to forcefully create Persona users. Most of the children who went in never came out. Most of the survivors have to take drugs to keep their Personas from revolting and killing them, drugs that shorten the user’s lifespan significantly.

Mitsuru is one of the few stable survivors. But she remembers those days. Too well. Seeing the Doctor at work triggered her trauma, taking her back to when she was just another test subject being cut open to create a weapon against the Shadows.

This detail is never elaborated on within PQ. It lets the scene play out all on its own, trusting players who know what happened to understand. It’s subtle, beautiful in a twisted way, and it perfectly understands Mitsuru as a character and the weight of the setting she came from.

There are plenty of other examples just like it. Yosuke talking about what makes him tick in the last dungeon. Margaret fighting with herself to keep from telling Elizabeth about what happens to her guest. My favorite is a running side plot that you see on the P4-Side version of the story, where Kanji almost adopts Ken as a little brother and tries to help him through a trauma that he doesn’t want to talk about. Kanji spent so many years unable to control himself. He sees Ken straying close to that path, and he wants to make sure it doesn’t happen. It’s heartwarming, with the sad irony that neither of them will remember it soon.

“Persona Q” is not lazy. It knows the material it’s working with well enough to pull off stings that hurt all the worse for knowing what they’re based in. When it’s firing on all cylinders, it packs all the punch of the mainline games. That’s a big part of why I love it so much.

But that only intensifies the core question here. If it understands its characters so well, what the Hell happened to some of them? Mitsuru, Ken, Yosuke, Kanji… All of them get lovely bits of characterization and touching moments, for better and for worse. But Teddie doesn’t. Teddie gets a million jokes about being a lowkey womanizer and a horribly ineffective, jealous wannabe Casanova.

To understand what makes him bad in “Persona Q,” we have to go back and piece together what made him function in “Persona 4.” Somewhere between the two, we’ll find our answer.

At the beginning of the game, he’s cowardly, a bit on the quiet and nervous side, and quick to find reasons to distrust anyone he sees. This is understandable given that his world is overflowing with monsters that would tear soft, hollow little things like him to ribbons. Survival and paranoia are one and the same within the foggy TV world.

Once he develops a human body and crosses over to the human world, though, his personality flips. He gains an attachment to being a “pretty boy,” he hunts new clothes and snacks without half a thought to their cost, and, yes, he hits on absolutely everything that is vaguely shaped like a woman. And also Kanji. He doesn’t hit on Nanako, though, seeing her more like an innocent playmate than an object of desire. (Which is probably a good thing, because any version of Yu would skin him alive if he got any funny ideas there.)

This is Teddie for about half the game. Impulsive, perverted, blind to consequence, and self-absorbed. The only thing he seems to care about is consuming as many pleasurable things as physically possible. He still wants to make the murders stop, but when the serious stuff is off the table, it’s right back to his bottomless gluttony.

Now, tell me. Do you hate Teddie during this section of the game? Do you think the jokes about his immaturity are overdone and make you want to push him away more than his old paranoia ever did?

If you said “yes,” good. _That’s the point_.

Look at the part of the game where his personality shifted. He developed a body and vacated his old home immediately after seeing his Shadow, which was attempting to make him realize that _he_ is a Shadow. It never got to say it out loud before Ted rejected it and the thing went on the offensive, though, giving him a narrow beam of deniability.

And deny he does. The doubts that his Shadow embodies all came from the time between meeting the team and crossing to our side. In essence, running from his world can be linked to running from the final truth his Shadow espoused, his true nature.

Now look at the things Teddie fixates on afterwards. Tasty food, his own charms, hitting on girls… These are all things that the rest of the team talked about while on his side, especially the girls. His world is bleak and dangerous, but then he meets people from a place with all these amazing things that he has never heard of. He hears their stories and slowly comes to resent his world and all it represents. He wants what the others have.

His human body lets him pursue these things. And yet, he’s not fully developed. That trip to the hospital where we see he has no actual bones? It represents that, though he looks like us on the outside, he’s still missing something fundamental to being a real person. He’s not fully grown.

He’s so childish because he _is a child_. In body, he looks like a teenager, but he still has so much to learn, so much to realize. He doesn’t pursue further growth because he’s too busy chasing the surface-level dressing of what he thinks being human is all about, the fairy tales that he escaped his world to find.

He only realizes he was missing such an important thing after his illusory ‘perfect world’ shattered. After Nanako died. This is the impetus for him turning around and realizing that he was a Shadow the whole time. He was a Shadow striving for the humanity he wasn’t born to have. Nanako was an innocent playmate, and when she left, she took the blinders of his innocence with her.

At this stage, he wants to give up and fade into the fog, but he can’t. Part of him still clings to the ego he developed, hence why he appears in the Velvet Room. It’s meant to help people like the Wild Cards grow when they need its help the most. He needs that help after Nanako’s death.

He gets it when Yu tells him that she’s okay. She was resuscitated, and Teddie is overjoyed to learn it. Through Yu, his Sensei, he finds a reason to hold onto his will to live, and he comes back a changed bear.

After his return, a lot of his harsher edges smooth off. His perversion? Reduced. He doesn’t harass the girls after he comes back. He’d still like their attention, but he doesn’t connive to get it anywhere near as much.

His self-absorption and blindness to others? Gone. As soon as he sees that Yu is left home alone after the trauma of almost losing his family, Teddie picks up his things and moves in with him. Yu was there when Ted needed him most. Ted wants to pay him back for it. He even nurses Yu back to health during the near-coma flu Yu catches in Golden. He has found a sense of responsibility.

He’s still pretty immature, though. During the ski trip in Golden, he tries to steal snacks when the power flickers off. In the cutscene after saving Marie, he gets roped into a scheme to see the girls bathing alongside Yosuke. It’s not clear what exactly lead up to this, but here he is, participating in another girl scheme. Old habits die hard, eh? (Either that or the writers shoehorned in one last outdated joke with the Golden rerelease that kind of missed Ted’s development. Meh.)

You can’t change who you are overnight. He still has to work on himself, but the events of November were the kick in the suit he needed to start. The buildup of him being a little prick for so many months pays off once he realizes he was wrong the entire time. The same lesson that most children need to learn, that life is more than chasing what makes you happy. There’s some work involved in it all, but it’s worth it in the end.

Now, to get back to the main point here, when does “Persona Q” take place? Immediately before Nanako is kidnapped. Her death hasn’t happened yet. Teddie hasn’t received the kick in the teeth he needs yet. In fact, he is at the part of the story where he is the most wrong, right before it all gets pulled out from under him. In essence, “Persona Q” is stuck in that moment right before a sneeze, and all of you know how god awful it feels to choke one of those fuckers back.

You can’t go any earlier than this, because the stage before this was also before Naoto’s recruitment. You can’t go any later than this because then you would either take the team from when they are completely focused on their game’s mystery or after it’s been cleared up, which makes it much more difficult to keep them from spoiling the almighty Hell out of their game’s story for people who have only played P3.

If they were intent on taking both teams from some point within their native games, they could not take any form of Teddie except his most immature. Either they represent him at this stage honestly, which they did, or they rewrite him to make him less abrasive, which would have, again, violated the core conceit of the crossover. It’s a Catch 22.

Even worse, forcing him to take that development within PQ itself is a tricky proposition. They do that sort of thing with a few other characters, and it largely works. Yukari and Mitsuru get more friendly with each other in P3 because they used a relaxed moment on a vacation to actually talk through the wall between them. Most of PQ is relaxed, too, and seeing the P4 team being much more friendly than SEES gives Yukari the push she needs to broker the chat. They have their development, leading them to act more like their matured selves from later in P3.

As mentioned earlier, Kanji and Ken share a moment that advances their characters, too, which even creates an interesting and tragic character beat on Ken’s side where he contemplates giving up his revenge quest against Shinjiro. They had their cake _and_ ate it!

But for Teddie, the thing that broke his immaturity was a tragedy so severe as to throw him into deep depression. The only thing in all of PQ matching this kind of impact is Rei realizing she’s actually been dead the entire time. That only happens at the very end of the game, and after that, things are too focused on PQ’s original story to zoom in on the bear’s problems. Teddie is trapped between the plots of both games.

Something similar happened to Akihiko. In PQ, his entire personality is training and protein. Mostly the protein. He doesn’t shut the fuck up about the stuff. That part is a terrible exaggeration of his character from P3, unlike how Teddie is pretty accurate to how he was, but Akihiko’s laser focus on his training and fighting is on point.

The depth in his character comes from _why_ he’s focused on those pursuits. Him and Shinjiro grew up in an orphanage together, hence why they’re ‘close.’ Also with them was Akihiko’s sister… Who died when the orphanage caught fire. Akihiko, a small child at the time, blames himself for being unable to save her, and so throws himself into any fight he thinks is just. “I know what it’s like to feel powerless, and I never want to feel that way again.”

The problem is that the constant fighting doesn’t actually resolve his emotional turmoil. It distracts him from it. He tells himself that he’s strong for charging into the fight, but in reality it’s blinding him from his inability to face the death of someone he loved. His sister’s death was never his fault. Blaming himself for it shows that he never truly coped.

This hole in his armor is torn open by Shinjiro’s death, but not in the way you might think. He’s hurt by it, deeply so, but the way Shinji went spoke to him. He died taking a bullet for Ken, who wanted him dead anyway. After so long of thinking Shinjiro was a coward for running away from SEES, he realizes that, in many ways that mattered, his old friend really was the stronger one between them. He carries that memory of true strength well, often calling to Shinjiro after battle from this point forward. He used to fight to run from his failures. Now, he faces his past openly.

You can see the parallels with Teddie already. PQ plucks SEES from the month before Shinjiro’s death. Akihiko is more wrong about his beliefs than ever. Shinjiro’s death is a necessity for his realization, meaning his stability as a character within PQ was weighed against Shinjiro being there at all. Worse still, while you could arguably use Rei as a substitute for Nanako in Teddie’s case, only someone Akihiko knows and assumes as much about as Shinjiro could cut him deep enough to force the reflection he so woefully needs. This means the only Akihiko we could have gotten was one who was willfully blinding himself with obsession.

To take it a step further, and perhaps lead into the third little birdie I’m plucking here today, a core component of his bad coping mechanism is a goal. He’s not fighting thin air here. He is specifically aiming himself at Tartarus and the Dark Hour. Neither of those things are present in PQ. Only the Shadows remain, but they don’t represent the same thing here that they did back in P3.

This carves off even more of Akihiko’s character. You could pull on a number of things for light scenes in his original appearance, ironically. The outside world reacting to Akihiko, like the girls following him around, could be funny. For PQ, they were left with one string to that bow, training. And, by extension, protein. This setting does not fit him.

The same goes for Chie. Where Akihiko has protein in half his lines, Chie has meat in ninety percent of them. Again, she’s a highly goal-oriented character. She’s unsure of her own value without propping herself up with others, so she focuses on the fight for her substance. She’s always positioned herself and her training as the pursuit of justice, as shown in her Social Link. The killer provided her both an outlet for her disposition and a way to look into the potential shortcomings of that worldview. It’s not as operatic as Akihiko’s tale, but it lays on a parallel highway.

In PQ, the only goal she has is the general direction of escaping the labyrinth, but that doesn’t become a pressing issue, exactly, until the third act. Without the extra pressure, the only thing left for her is the comedy trimmings from her original appearance. Her cowardice in the face of the unknown, her rivalry with Yosuke, and good old ‘fsteak.

It gets exhausting terribly fast. If it tells you anything, Chie is one of my favorite characters from “Persona 4.” She was the first character I chose to romance back when I played the original release. I could barely stand using her for the first dungeon of “Persona Q” because of how singular her focus was. I swapped her out for Minato as soon as the opposite team appeared. At least his melancholy had some texture.

All three of these characters pulled the short straw for “Persona Q.” The timing was wrong, the tone was wrong, the pressure was wrong. This game _does_ have some very potent character beats. It’s not lacking for drama either. By the Great Will, Zen and Rei share one of the single most enthralling stories in the entire Persona franchise! How did Teddie, Akihiko, and Chie get reduced to meme machines?

It’s because of one vital truth about how characters function in writing. They are not standalone elements. They are built for the setting in which they appear. Teddie has an entire arc in “Persona 4” with a satisfying payoff for his annoyances. Akihiko and Chie both benefit from the pressure that the main plot of their games put on them, drawing out valuable self-reflection that contrasts sharply with the comedy they’re packing. They work well in the settings they were designed for. “Persona Q” took them out of those settings, leaving behind the support present within them that helped them stand tall. You cannot pick a building up off sturdy foundations and then expect it to stand as strong when you drop it in a field of sloppy mud.

But wait, you might be thinking. Doesn’t this also apply to other characters? Aren’t Ken and Mitsuru tied to the tragedy of the Dark Hour, too? Don’t they lose support by having it pulled from them?

Yes, they do. The difference is that the game finds other ways to support them for the duration of its run. Mitsuru interacting with a team that’s actually composed well and relatively normal makes how out of touch and secretive she is stand out, prompting Yukari to push their shared story beat forward. Kanji reaching out to Ken and giving him the emotional support he needs, that no one was able or willing to give him in “Persona 3,” plays off his character arc in a way that launches it into a new and compelling direction.

Characters are utilitarian. They serve a function within their stories. A new story for them can still work if it gives them a compatible function to serve.

I dare say the “Persona Q” team knew this the whole time, but the structure of the game only let them account for certain characters. They got as many rounded out as they could, but some were left hanging. It’s an unfortunate truth with projects so big and involving so many people. There’s only so much time to go back and edit the underlying structure of the thing when you have a deadline to meet. You can only rewrite so much work before you risk never finishing the project at all. Your best bet is to polish the parts that work and correct for what didn’t next time.

I believe this is what happened here because they corrected the problem in “Persona Q2.” The flanderization is toned down significantly here. Teddie is still an annoying, childish wannabe Romeo, but they texture it by doing more with his ongoing rivalry with the other mascot characters. There was only so much Koromaru could do to bounce Ted’s ego, seeing as he’s a dog and incapable of speech, but the incredibly mouthy and arrogant Morgana added the extra twist needed to give that sort of subplot substance and longevity. Teddie is still ultimately a joke character, but he has more varied material instead of telling the same joke for eighty hours.

Meanwhile, Akihiko and Chie receive exactly what they needed to bring out their better aspects: a goal. In the first PQ, the only objective within every dungeon was to reach the end, beat the boss, and get their key item. It’s simple and functional, but not exactly pressing.

In PQ2, however, every dungeon has a more involved storyline with something more urgent on the line. The very first dungeon has Makoto and Haru kidnapped with the threat of execution looming overhead. The second dungeon has Yosuke MIA, running from carnivorous dinosaurs alongside a small herbivore that has his face, for a reason that only kind of makes sense in context. The third leaves Minato and Aigis missing while a whole sci-fi film tries to hunt them down for termination.

Having such clear-cut, immediately alarming goals to pursue in the moment-by-moment plot lights a fire under Akihiko and Chie’s asses, bringing out the serious and touching elements of their personalities that were hidden away by the first title’s softer tension. The underlying structure of PQ2 better provides a function for them.

It also helps that none of them have to support as much of the game’s runtime as before. On top of being a handful of people in a cast of nearly thirty playable units, they aren’t introduced into the plot until well into the second and third dungeons, as opposed to how PQ gave you everyone from the end of the first dungeon onward. Reducing how much of the game they were around for cut back on how many times their old material could be reused. I think Akihiko only gets to mention protein once, and it felt more like a nod to the critique of PQ1 to me. They fixed the problem.

They even found ways to draw out stronger character beats for everyone by increasing the interactivity between teams. I wouldn’t by any means say that Akihiko is sexist about a woman’s ability to fight. He takes orders from Mitsuru without a fuss, knowing full well that she’s one of the only people who could kick his ass. But still, certain girls who he starts to care for trigger a protective instinct in him, almost as if he sees his sister in them. His Social Link with the female protagonist in P3 Portable all but says as much outright.

In PQ2, he develops a master/student relationship with Chie, who looks up to him because of how seriously he takes his training. He sees a girl who wants to get stronger, and he respects it so much that he agrees to train her. It’s a damn fine dynamic for characters whose arcs and personalities share a few key beats. Every teammate gets this treatment, but it stands out especially for those who were shafted in terms of content previously.

Say what you like about PQ as a spinoff series, but it’s clear to me that they do care about the games that preceded them. They fumbled some with their handling in the first go, and then they fixed it on take two. I feel the heart put into these gems, and really, that’s the best part of the package. They feel like proper celebrations of what makes Persona great. In an industry filled with games that feel soulless and cookie-cutter so often, I’m happy to take a set of games that realize where they went wrong and worked hard to correct it going forward.

There are a few lessons to be had here. Understand what exactly makes your characters work, both within themselves and in the setting that supports them. Sometimes perfection must be surrendered in exchange for finishing a project on time. Learning from your mistakes and showing that you can avoid making them a second time is as noticeable as it is admirable.

Oh, and absolutely _screw those fucking dolls from the horror school dungeon_. I hate them. I hate them so much. _And don’t get me started on the_ _ **bloody ceiling babies**_. Papa Psyby ain’t got time for that shit. I’m skipping to 2 and punching Kamoshida in the face again.

The bulk of this chapter was written before the release of Persona 5 Strikers here in the west. Well, technically all of it was if you only count the proper release date, not the early release date for digital deluxe buyers. That game is actually why I’m on so much of a Persona kick with my Writing Desk content right now.

I got myself a copy of the digital deluxe version and have been playing it almost exclusively since the early launch. I’m already past the second spotlight tower in the first level, for those of you who have also played it already. I have only four things to say right now.

I love Futaba’s new hat and coat combo. I like all of the new outfits, but hers especially.

Sojiro telling Joker that the attic is still his room all these months later melted my heart.

Sophia is a precious dumpling who would deserve hugs if she wanted them.

And, of course (you knew it was coming),

_I LOVE THE BATTERING RAM!!!_


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